"Today is an important occasion," says David Byrne in the opening words to his 2007 Nonesuch release, The Knee Plays. Indeed. Today is his 56th birthday, and Nonesuch wishes him a very happy one. We don't know how he'll celebrate the occasion or what birthday gifts will be heading his way, but here you can enjoy "(The Gift of Sound) Where the Sun Never Goes Down," also from The Knee Plays:

Byrne will celebrate the gift of sound in a different way in downtown New York this summer. He'll be turning an entire building in lower Manhattan---the landmark Battery Maritime Building---into an interactive and, in his humble words, "very large musical instrument" called Playing the Building. (It's 9,000 square feet.) The exhibit opens on May 31 and runs through August 10; it will be free and open to the public on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. On davidbyrne.com, David describes it this way:

Playing the Building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure---to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes---and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

This exhibit (the photo at right is a mock-up) is presented by Creative Time, which has organized a number of unique, site-specific sound installations in the city, throughout its 30-year history, including 2002's Sonic Garden at the World Financial Center with David Byrne and Laurie Anderson.

For more information, visit davidbyrne.com. or creativetime.org/byrne.

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