Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard: Softening the Piano: Are Instruments Parasitic? Are Instruments Contagious?

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard is Associate Professor at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen and head of Institute of Imaginary Sound -a virtual sub department at RMC
Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard works with both physical and imaginary sound and various other non-sonic media. He considers his work to be a basic research in realities and is interested in how bubble-like systems unfold themselves as human conditions.
The meetings between the individual body and these different bubble-like systems are key drivers in Løkkegaards praxis and he's interested in how to escape these bubbles, and if not escape them, then how they can be warped, wrestled and renegotiated.
In his artistic research Løkkegaard is interested in western musical instruments, not only as sources of sound but also as cultural markers embedded within different systems and hierarchies. He considers these instruments as critical and even dangerous sites that should be approached with the greatest caution; as loaded interfaces - not only between mechanical movement and the production of sound, between phantasms and physical reality but also as contaminated places that should be treated as such.
Abstract
Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard: Softening the Piano: Are Instruments Parasitic? Are Instruments Contagious?
I´m interested in Western musical instruments as being critical and even dangerous sites that should be approached with the greatest caution; as loaded interfaces - not only between mechanical movement and the production of sound, between phantasms and physical reality but also as contaminated places that should be treated as such. Infected places of parasitic discourse ready to jump at you and embed themselves in you. How can we soften these sedimented parasitic layers within the instruments yet silent and invisible to the eye?