Mia Salsjö: A Score for the Len Lye Centre

If this building could sing, what would it sound like?
In A Score for the Len Lye Centre artist and composer Mia Salsjö has transposed the shimmering architectural contours of our art museum into a musical score.

Commissioned to unfold across the tenth anniversary year, the work encompasses 1,000 graphic scores, performances by musicians from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and a site-specific sound installation.

Mia Salsjö’s architectural sonification is an act of translation, transposing the language of a built structure into sound. To compose this work, Salsjö meticulously traced over hundreds of plans gifted to her by Pattersons architects, applying her own idiosyncratic, colour-coded numerical system. The spatial and mathematical relationships within these plans were superimposed with musical staves to determine varying registers, pitch, and notation. The curvilinear folds of the building, and its materials of concrete and steel, became data points, alongside Lye’s gestural marks and doodles, which were integrated as sonic figures.

A Score for the Len Lye Centre is composed for thirteen stringed instruments, with a synthesiser playing recordings of Len Lye’s kinetics performing. Lye correlated his sculptures with musical instruments, leaving their auditory traces in the Len Lye Foundation Archive for the then unknowable composers of the future to use. Listeners familiar with Lye’s work may be able to hear the electromagnetic frequencies of Universe (1963/1998), the sparkling bells of Wand Dance (1965/2018), or the rhythmical pulse of Blade (1959–76). When the work was activated by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra as a series of physical sound waves in space, the interior architecture of the Len Lye Centre became a resonant musical object, amplifying the artist’s intention.