Broken Rooms: field recordings as a generative sound installation
Before the later light installations and laser shows, Broken Rooms placed an evolving sound process at the centre of a shared work. Its project text records the point where an installation became a partner in live performance.
How Broken Rooms brings field recordings, random generators and live playing together. A documented account of Broken Composers’ first collective work in 2017.
The city as recorded material
Broken Rooms appeared in the parallel programme of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2017. Its source material included traffic, a subway station, a basketball court, a cellist in an underpass and bells from Red Square.
These recordings were not simply played back as one continuous environmental track. They entered a system in which fragments could be cut, rearranged and transformed.
Small operations, changing combinations
The original documentation describes more than 300 random generators working together. Different operations cut incoming audio into fragments, arrange sequences, transform sound into melodic material and apply effects.
The artists describe uneven results: stretches of noise, interrupted by combinations they found unexpectedly beautiful and complex. That account keeps the process open-ended. It does not claim that every moment is a finished composition or that chance automatically produces a satisfying musical form.
Playing alongside the installation
At the exhibition opening, the artists began to play along with the system. The project text connects that encounter with the formation of Broken Composers and the choice of the name.
The full case preserves the original account. It offers a specific example of generative sound becoming part of a live situation, without extending that technical description to every subsequent performance by the duo.