5. From Damage to Salvage

Aeolian Guitars and Floating Violins

Within a wide range of ecologically involved musical practices, from Vienna’s Vegetable Orchestra (involving actual vegetables) to jazz improvisations with whales, Stefan Östersjö’s outdoor instruments work more as sensors than as performative tools. They reveal a similarly unpredictable “weather-world” attunement to that of Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants. The point of these sonic interactions is not renaturing or decomposition for its own sake but rather setting up a relationship in which elemental forces can work acoustically through the instruments’ materials, keeping their human players in the background. A 2013 experiment with a “floating guitar” strung with fishing line, for example, called attention to air as sonic presence, as the “aeolian sounds from the guitar blend with the rich soundscape of water and land . . . [in] a transmodal experience of the instrument and the place.”9 A 2014 video of the Landscape Quartet (Östersjö with Bennett Hogg, Matthew Sansom, and Sabine Vogel) shows four human figures on the edge of Klagshamns Udde, a marshy peninsula near Malmö, Sweden. They stand (mostly) still in the wind, holding a flute, a guitar, and several violins at slightly changing angles. The current at their feet rolls out into the Sound between Sweden and Denmark as their instruments hum and sing in the wind. Sometimes the strings sound like fingernails on piano wires, sometimes like a human vocal trill; the flute makes a low, tremulous whistle as Vogel holds it upright in the foggy breeze. Seagulls call in the distance. At certain points, the strings’ pitches match in a ringing that spreads up and down the scale. In the video, the human figures fade out of the scene, leaving only the instruments’ aeolian sounds and the calling of birds, then return as ghostly outlines. Mediated through microphones and video editing, the short film evokes contingent human presence in a liminal environment, with instruments acting more as transponders than performance tools.10

These works rely on nonhuman forces and aeolian effects, which can sound wild and strange when heard for the first time. A review of Mats Edén and Stefan Östersjö’s Wind, Water, Strings, Bow describes an adapted guitar hanging from a tree, with the “extended timbre” of “wind roaring through the strings” like a feral chorus blending with the sound of running water.11 In a broad sense, aeolian processes involve air shaping the surface of the earth—not only by erosion but also through the changing patterns that wind creates with snow or sand. Thus, wind becomes perceptible by visually or sonically engaging with its environments. The wind’s effect when howling in our ears, or in the rhythmic patterns of snapping flags—these are the same processes that humans harness in wind instruments, guiding air streams to resonate. While wind instruments contain a column of air, set into vibration by the player blowing into or over a mouthpiece, air in the outer environment is what activates aeolian instruments, setting strings into vibration without human touch or whistling through an open tube. When the wind engages strings, it creates uncanny effects because these sounds are unpredictable, usually in the background, and attuned to the physical world in ways humans often forget. Eerie sheets of sound result from overtones triggered by air currents, creating what Lawrence Kramer calls an “acoustic surplus.”12 As intervallic relationships that form familiar chords (octave, fifth, and third), overtones or harmonics can sound when released by human musicians—for example, when a harpist places the heel of the hand halfway up a string and plucks a bell-like tone from a halved-again distance above with the thumb. When the wind sets overtones in motion, the sound is less controlled and creates more of a sighing or humming effect; the human player is out of the picture, allowing elemental forces to mix sounds that might or might not be heard as music. Though some disagreement persists among physicists, this effect results either from an “aeroelastic” action of strings snapping back, as in the sound of humming power lines, or from the “Kármán vortex street effect,” in which the wind “sheds” spiral patterns along individual strings, releasing spontaneous overtones.13 The sound can begin as a vague ringing that sometimes builds into masses of chimelike tones. Listeners may be surprised at the almost animal quality of the sound, like strange voices linking instruments to earth in unexpected moments.

Aeolian sounds, specifically the aeolian harp as a human-made instrument manipulated and played by the wind, have long been a source of literary and musical inspiration, from the famous biblical Psalm 137, in which the exiled Jews hung their harps along the river in Babylon, to ancient Greece (in instruments named for the wind god Aeolus), and later through the Romantic period in Europe, when Chopin’s Etude Op. 25, No. 1 imitated the rolling sounds of an aeolian harp at the mercy of the wind. An aeolian guitar might call up different associations with popular music or folk-music festivals, but the sounds of its wind-activated strings are similar to those rolling through a harp on a windy day. Artistic interventions like Östersjö’s foreground the material bodies of the instruments themselves as subjects interacting with wind or water rather than objects to be played according to a written score or chord sheet.

In his floating and aeolian sound works, Östersjö seeks to break down traditional distinctions between “music as sound and as structure,” between “inner hearing and concrete listening,” and between “expert” and “amateur” listeners, favoring instead “oscillating” acoustic awarenesses in which subjectivity and materiality are intimate, unpredictable, and closely related to their shared milieu.14 Working collaboratively with Bennett Hogg in the Landscape Quartet, Östersjö has questioned the role of string instruments in the “cultural construct” of the concert hall, preferring to treat a violin as a “sensor in the environment,” placing microphones inside it and dragging it through the woods or extending it with fishing lines and “a hazel stick wedged under the fingerboard” to create “a kind of harp.”15 Placing guitars and violins in trees, partly as sculptures (which do decay like Lockwood’s pianos) and partly as aeolian instruments, Östersjö and Hogg have noted the challenges of registering sound through instruments that are as “limited” in pitch range as they are “rich” in unpredictably complex sounds.16 In a similar project, Ontario-based Jurgita Žvinklytė and Matti Palonen have constructed “tree harps” by attaching strings to the resonant chambers of dead trunks and finding that “each tree makes a unique sound.”17 Weather affects these outdoor instruments as well. While bowing strings with twigs in a Landscape Quartet improvisation one winter day, Bennett Hogg started to notice “fine, hard crystals of snow” making a “precise ticking sound” on the violin’s body, as well as noticing that “snow falling on the instrument also falls on us,”18 creating equal reciprocity between musical and human bodies. When engaging directly with water, as in a 2013 experiment with “river violins” and guitar, the collaborators found that in addition to the aeolian sounds of the currents over the violins’ extended strings, microphones attached to the instruments encouraged a kind of “micro-sonic listening” that required making choices later in the recording studio about how to relate to the river itself as a “massive, constant drone.”19

If wind, snow, and water work as elemental media through the human-made medium of a stringed instrument, this complex is an example of what John Durham Peters calls “ensembles of natural element and human craft” or “infrastructures” that are not simply “vessels” but also, following Friedrich Kittler, work as “ontological shifters.”20 Ecologically attuned musical instruments offer not just novel sounds but also new possibilities for being and meaning that occur through changes in perception. Rachel Carson once noted that although humans have evolved so they can no longer live in the ocean, we can still “re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.”21 Though Carson was thinking of cameras and other devices that mediate watery environments through sight, a musical instrument can help us to hear our way into other habitats—or even the watery worlds of creatures related to our ancient evolutionary past. As Melody Jue has put it in her approach to “blue” or water-based media, “sensing devices . . . teach us just how entangled in the ocean we already are.”22 Close listening, further mediated by microphones, can change how instruments sound when embedded in new environments, thereby amplifying the instruments’ role as ecologically sounding bodies. Bennett Hogg’s violin strings start to sound contingent when in water, more like a “flute or chamber organ,” depending on the tension of the strings and the speed of the current.23 The sheer difficulty of entering and staying in a river while manipulating instruments prevents easy romanticizing of these projects; the musician “stumbles and splashes” in “an acute experience of cold and wet.”24 The sounds of the instrument reflect back to the performer (who is just as much a listener) the day’s conditions in a particular environment.

Using aeolian instruments as sensors is in fact not new; an Italian abbot strung wires from his house to a nearby tower in Milan in 1785, listening for the whine of the wind when the “weather was about to change.”25 Romantic poets and scientists became curious about the “Aeolian Harp” (as in Coleridge’s 1795 poem) as an indicator of vibration, as a site of sounding and listening, as a metaphor for the human nervous system, and even as a “model for a human/mind body conceived as a machine for translating sensory vibrations into consciousness.”26 A strange collapse of the subject/object binary occurs when the sounding agent also becomes a listening, or at least a transponding, one. This form of reciprocal attunement is what musicians like Östersjö seek to enact and document, however awkward the human splashing in a river or the playing of violin strings with twigs in the winter cold. What results is not just a performer with an instrument; “the constellation of wind–tree–strings–guitar–performer thus becomes an eco-system” as the wind affects the strings and the human player “adjusts to the direction and force of the wind.”27 As Thoreau described the aeolian sounds of a telegraph wire, “the fibres of all things have their tension, and are strained like the strings of a lyre.”28

Flutes as Instruments for Listening

String instruments are of course not the only means of creating ecologically attuned sound. Östersjö’s collaborator Sabine Vogel has worked with metal, wooden, and clay flutes, as well as stones and microphones, as sounding bodies (Klangkörper) to interact with wind, water, and plants. She brings her background as a “classical plus” musician, working in jazz, punk, and free improvisation, and in sound design for a film company into her work, which is based more in questions than in product-oriented performance. “How does the weather affect a flute?” she asks as she focuses on “tuning in” to the edge of a lake, to leaves and wind, and to long grass that she has played in tandem with her human-made instrument.29 Listening to horsetail grass through the medium of the flute (as an aerophone with a specific channel for air), Vogel became interested in how the grass itself would sound. The resulting recording (“catch the horsetail,” 2012) uses a bansuri (Indian bamboo flute) with an internal microphone, “a new instrument—kind of a horsetail flute, that reacted on blowing and fingering” to yield breathing, clicking dynamics in tandem with a Northumberland meadow.30 This instrument sounds different from a flute played only by human breath, just as an aeolian harp or guitar does not sound like predictably plucked or strummed strings, turning sonic expectations inside out.

Vogel’s approach is not limited to “pastoral” environments, however. Like Katt Hernandez, whose PhD project (advised by Östersjö) traces ghostly urban soundscapes in Stockholm’s gentrified areas, Vogel works with city histories as well. Taking inspiration from the old clay factories outside Berlin, where the bricks that built the city include flutelike holes, Vogel and her collaborator, Ute Wassermann, have played clay flutes in air and water, specifically in an aquarium. In their filmed performance Schwebeteilchen (2023), the musicians make percussive as well as pitched sounds with the clay flutes, which, when submerged and amplified in the aquarium, begin to resonate in surprisingly metallic, aeolian-like sounds. With the image of human hands rising and falling in the water, manipulating flutes and hydrophones, and as the clay flute bodies breathe and bubble underwater, the viewer-listener may sense a hidden layer of the city coming back to life. In this approach, similar to that of artists Anna Orlikowska and Sarina Scheidegger, who use ceramic vessels “with their own frequencies” to resonate in water,31 musical materiality “returns clay to earth” in a reparative move.32 Instead of human harnessing of air or water through instruments, these works show elements and materials form situated ensembles that take on sounding lives of their own.

With clay or bamboo flutes placed underwater, or with different sizes of flutes wedged in the ground so that the wind can blow through them, Vogel’s work recalls not only ancient instruments using water to move sound waves and the many efforts of humans to imitate or interact with birdsongs but also Indigenous American and Sufi ideas of a flute as a body with its nine openings, separated from its origins in the reedbed. By returning the flute to the ground or water, the musician performs an act of ecological repair. To quote the Sufi poet Rumi on the sound of flutes and strings: “and if the whole world’s harp / should burn up, / there will still be hidden instruments / playing, playing.”33 This apocalyptic vision of burning in the form of a harp, however metaphorical, shows how powerful musical instruments are in imagining ecological relations. Likewise, Vogel’s renatured, “hidden” flutes do more than simply experiment with wind, plants, and water. They are reembedded in the source materials of their ancient forms. Drawing on her experience in Australia, learning to slow down in the Aboriginal “dreamtime” model of ecological attunement,34 Vogel’s work with these instruments helps to shift perception away from sensational or perfectionist performance and toward slow, close listening to subtle sounds that surround us, whether in a wetland or a city.

The act of making a flute from unconventional organic materials is another way to engage with sound in an embodied, renaturing way. In a 2023 workshop in Växjö, Sweden, visual and performance artist Julia Adzuki introduced the “ovular flute,” an instrument made from ostrich eggs purchased from a farm outside Stockholm. Participants worked with these surprisingly strong hollowed-out eggs, forming a mouthpiece made of seashell and reed in a delicate gluing process, using sandpaper to smooth the main opening so the reed’s angle would make a clear, deep tone, and finally drilling a row of holes in the eggshell to change pitches with the fingers. The materials’ shapes and slipperiness made the flute-making more challenging than it might first seem, with each egg balanced on a paper cup during the mouthpiece-making process. By blowing into the eggs, listening, and responding with sandpaper to adjust the reed’s angle, participants found that they were “tuning in” (to use Vogel’s term35) rather than simply playing to make sound. Instead of mapping each flute’s holes according to a given pattern, participants worked by listening and experimenting to find the sonic intervals that sounded most clearly and fit the fingers most naturally.

While taking turns with the drill, workshop participants could also explore additional instruments that Adzuki had brought with her. These included a bone harp shaped like a harness to be worn across the shoulders and played on either side of one’s head, so that the player can hear the strings’ resonance, regardless of whether an audience is present, and several large gourds to be worn on one’s head, with rattling reeds suspended in the line of sight—a zone for listening and touching as the “hat” and “veil” respond to the body’s movement. The bone instrument’s structure also relates to each human body’s shoulder blades, spine, and skull, as a reminder that the body itself is a resonating instrument. Because of the way bone conduction occurs through the skull, the instrument wearer hears and feels vibrations more strongly than others do in the room. Adzuki’s workshop took on an atmosphere of curious play as participants tried on these instruments as body extensions, tested sound and response, and laughed as the usual earnestness of musical performance fell away. When the ovular flutes were mostly complete, participants tested different fingerings to find provisional scales. Closed eyes helped in shaping the warm tones that the angled mouthpiece made possible. Unlike learning to play a recorder as children in school, the players learned simply by doing, testing the size of the holes against their breath and body position, with the kind of reciprocal attunement that Östersjö’s and Vogel’s instruments encourage as well.

All of these instruments in the workshop space enacted the body-extension idea that we have explored here with reference to burning and drowning pianos, but in a more literal and intimate way. While organically made instruments such as the “pumpkin drum” or “carrot marimba” played by the Vegetable Orchestra in Austria might seem gimmicky, their origins in the earth (or in the body of an ostrich, as in Adzuki’s ovular flutes) give them a fragility and relatedness that remind us how close even a sophisticated grand piano is to forest and ground, with its maple, mahogany, copper, and iron. Snake rattles inside Appalachian fiddles or experiments with beehives inside pianos create a similar, surprising intimacy, reframing the instrument as a habitat as natural as a dead tree while changing its sounds along with creaturely humming and buzzing.36 Likewise, while breathing into a flute made from an egg, the human player may experience a perceptual shift: the instrument is not just a tool for sound but a material, mediating link between our species and others.

The Resonating Tree

One of Julia Adzuki’s instruments links piano back to forest in a radical way. Resonant Bodies, a work originally designed for the hearing and sight impaired to be able to feel sonic vibrations, is made of a large ash tree trunk strung with twenty-one piano wires. Adzuki tunes the copper wires to resonate along the C-scale overtone series (the octave, fifth, and third intervals that occur in regular ratios and that manifest in aeolian effects). The instrument, shown in Figure 6, is long and deep enough for a human body to fit inside; Adzuki encourages people to crawl in, close their eyes, and experience vibration activated by plucking the strings or by striking the tree’s exterior with a mallet. Exposing piano wires on the outside of the tree trunk, rather than keeping them hidden, as they would be in the body of an upright or a grand with the lid down, demystifies the idea of piano and at the same time creates a new, wilder version of the kind of mechanism one might play at home. Inserting the human body into an instrument (an inversion similar to that of a flute submerged in water) also shifts conventional ideas of what it means to play or listen to musical sounds. By feeling as well as hearing the sound waves released from the wires and by touching the smooth, vibrating wood, participants become conductors of sound as well.

Like a piano, the Resonant Bodies instrument is as heavy and unwieldy as it is delicate. For a 2022 climate grief event in Copenhagen, a Lost Species Walk through the park-like Assistens Cemetery, Adzuki and her partner-collaborator, Patrick Dallard, brought a large trailer, which created a challenge in finding city parking, and a cart to hold the instrument while being pulled in the procession. During pauses in the walk, participants, locals who happened to be walking in the cemetery, and landscape workers took turns plucking the wires, climbing inside the instrument, drumming on its exterior, and placing their ears against it to hear as well as feel its vibrating resonance. Like the other instruments discussed here, the tree invited a playful rather than perfectionist approach to music-making (there is no one correct way to play the strings or strike the tree’s surface), as well as ambiguity between performance and exploration. The low, humming, open intervals of the piano wires invited everyone to slow down and listen as well as experiment with the tree-instrument’s sounds. This oscillating change in perspective echoes Stefan Östersjö’s sense of collapsing binaries between different listening positions.37 In Julia Adzuki’s terms, what tree-instrument player-listeners experience is an “accord of inner and outer landscape.”38

In her book The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard notes that “in normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin” but that “climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world.”39 Hildyard is thinking in particular of the petrochemical extensions of human and nonhuman experience, but the idea of a second body connected to the wider world is also helpful in thinking of musical instrument extensions and the perceptual shifts they invite. During the Lost Species Walk, participants (even those who had never planned to find themselves lying inside a giant ash trunk) discovered permeable boundaries between themselves and the tree, between their own skin and the surrounding environment, and even between the living and the dead buried all around them. Experiencing vibrations through the whole body, in connection to a tree transformed into an instrument—or a more-than-instrument—made everyone a human medium as well, hearing, feeling, and transmitting sound waves. The idea of a piano radically renatured into a tree’s body, which itself mediated live vibrations even in its dead state, thereby shifts the sense of what is possible to salvage, even as much of the world we know is at risk. At the end of the procession, Julia Adzuki passed out acorns for participants to plant.

Harp Transplant

In response to works like Lockwood’s and Adzuki’s, coauthor Heidi Hart has experimented with a harp transplanted into her garden in North Carolina, in the southeastern United States. Though a harp is clearly not a piano, it is closely related to that instrument in its scalar structure and its shape that mirrors the piano’s cast-iron frame. In fact, the harp inside a piano has been known to serve as an instrument in its own right, notably in the Marx Brothers’ 1937 film A Day at the Races, in which Harpo Marx breaks a piano apart as he plays “Wreckmaninoff” and then pulls out the harp from inside.40 Planting a harp outdoors recalls Lockwood’s Piano Garden—as if the piano’s interior had already been exposed.

Using a posthole digger, Heidi’s husband prepared the red-clay ground at the foot of a cherry tree. The Gothic harp that Heidi found to plant is slightly smaller than her indoor harp of similar design; it is used and of lesser quality, if not entirely “defunct” in Lockwood’s terms. All of its strings are nylon, not the organic sheep gut or minerally based wound steel used in the middle and low ranges of more expensive harps, but the sounding body is made of walnut, with metal fasteners inside the soundboard to which the strings’ external pegs attach. This particular model does not have feet and would normally depend on a player’s body to balance it while playing. In a posthole in the garden, it is stable enough to stay upright in heavy wind, rain, leaves, ice, heat, and humidity—but not to withstand decomposition under these elemental conditions (Figure 7).

Heidi planted the harp in mid-April, when weather and humidity are quite variable in central North Carolina. Within a few weeks, the strings’ pitches became noticeably detached from the diatonic or stepwise scale that mirrors that of a piano keyboard. Resisting the temptation to keep retuning the harp (with the truism in mind that harpists spend half of their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune, even in the best of conditions), Heidi has played and documented the harp in its process of decay through more than a year. Several months into the project, the soundboard’s outer layer of wood became delaminated, leaving a gap in which spiderwebs appeared on summer mornings. Already the harp was becoming a more-than-instrument, partly in the sense of Julia Adzuki’s resonating tree and partly as a kind of insect hotel. Webs between the strings became a common sight as well, especially in early fall, when orb weavers and other spiders are most active in the Southern woods. One insect, the eastern leaf-footed bug (a kind of stinkbug that looks quite intimidating when full grown), laid a perfect row of eggs along one of the harp’s G strings. That these tiny brown spheres did not come loose even from the vibrating string shifted perception about what aesthetic beauty is, especially since the harp is often associated with stylized images of angels and upscale performance settings. The cyclical processes of weathering, decay, and changing habitats not only estrange the harp’s conventional appearance but also reveal its biological entanglements.

In the summer’s heat and humidity, the harp’s strings became so de-tuned that their pitches hardly resembled a scale at all. Some lower pitches sounded higher than their neighbors; others gravitated toward the same pitch as the string next to them. Sitting down to play, Heidi found that rather than replicating known musical melodies or harmonic structures, she would respond to sounds nearby—a beeping truck in reverse, a cardinal’s trilling song in a nearby tulip poplar—in another example of an embodied, situated sound ensemble. With each harp session, imitation and gesture became more important than coherent lyrical patterns. Listening to the strange detuning of the instrument, Heidi would experiment with sound cells of three or four pitches repeated up and down the harp’s range (each one sounding different) or with the iconic glissandi associated with dream sequences in classic films. These ascending and descending rolls became tonally disorienting rather than associatively predictable, inviting even closer listening and decentering auditory expectations. An occasional rush of wind played with the harp, activating aeolian tremors, though not as the brilliant, rolling sounds that would occur with a harp fully exposed to the air. (This one’s lowest strings are partially buried at the base.)

When the cherry, sweet gum, horse chestnut, tulip poplar, and oak trees nearby started shedding leaves in fall, some were blown between the harp strings and stayed there. Playing the even more slack, detuned strings with their leaf tangle, Heidi found that they made a metallic buzzing sound. Like the strips of paper used in some harp arrangements to evoke the sound of medieval instruments (much like the paper flapping inside pianos in Lisa Streich’s Orchestra of Black Butterflies), and like the Appalachian snake rattle added to the interior of a violin, the leaves added a completely new sonic texture to the instrument. Heidi experimented with downward glissandi using the backs of her fingernails (an extended technique used in some legitimate harp repertoire as well) in response to this new complication. Returning to her regularly tuned Gothic harp indoors, she found that the responsive freedom of improvisation with the transplanted harp created more curiosity and freedom inside too.

After exposure to severe cold and even some rare Southern ice pellets, followed by another season of rain and heat, some of the outdoor harp’s strings loosened to the point that they actually felt more like gut than nylon. They made a wavering sound when plucked, almost like a moan. The lower part of the soundboard became completely delaminated, so that light showed through the wood and the metal fasteners behind the string pegs looked like teeth inside the body of the harp. Leaves, spiders, beetles, stones, and seedlings filled in the base of the soundboard. When Hurricane Helene ravaged the mountains of western North Carolina in September 2024, the storm’s edge struck the foothill region where the harp is located; heavy winds and rainfall pulled the upper strings completely away from the lower ones, leaving a gap in between and a tangle at the bottom. As of this writing, only the lowest and highest strings still sound a tone at all. In its middle range, the harp’s strings sound like thrumming leather.

If the harp has been considered a somewhat mystical instrument in some cultures, this one has come down to earth like aging skin and bones. It is no longer a meticulously tuned medium for tempered scales but a radically democratic container for a wild range of chromatic, mimetic, and sometimes microtonal variation. Loosening her own ingrained ideas of musical perfectionism, Heidi has found that a dying instrument can actually foster more aliveness in playing, like Julia Adzuki’s ash tree trunk. After the hurricane, the harp became an unexpected medium for climate grief; sitting down to play it brought up strong associations with far greater losses in the nearby mountains.

The transplanted harp has also made an unexpected connection with the underground sound art and musical community in Iran, where, as we have noted, instrument destruction has been anything but an artistic luxury. For the 2024 Listening Academy (hosted by the Listening Biennial) in Berlin, Heidi contributed a sound art piece combining recordings of the harp transplant and of the decayed harpsichord in her office. She was not aware that this piece would become part of a larger sound work including recordings by the group’s concurrent gathering in Tehran, where musicians are acutely sensitive to the risks of their work and also to the trauma of sounds not normally associated with violence (for example, the morning call to prayer coinciding with executions).41 At first hearing, Heidi worried that her sound work with damaged instruments would be problematic in the context of a joint listening session between the two groups, which was facilitated online. She was surprised to find that sound artist Golnoosh Heshmati had linked her piece to a recording of women weaving Kashan rugs; the sounds of percussive harpsichord keys related to the beating of the loom and a women’s mourning song behind it. The additional overlap of city sounds in Tehran with the decaying harp’s loosened, untuned strings—noticeable when doubly transplanted into a musical environment of microtones rather than European scales—came as another moment of surprise. This generous approach to what could easily have sounded like an insensitive insertion of artistic privilege moved the harp piece into more ambiguous spaces between music and handwork and between art and documentary sound.

This material, perceptual, and intercultural transformation shows that piano or harp transplants work as more than mere experiments. They allow for human and nonhuman curiosity, they provide literal habitats and sonic pleasures, and in some particular cases, their sounds can even stretch across geopolitical differences to expose both the power and fragility of musical materials. As the other instruments described in this chapter demonstrate, setting a flute or guitar into relationship with water, wind, ice, or plants can cross boundaries between human culture and elemental media as well. Letting go of human control allows these instruments to whistle or moan in wild, unpredictable ways that invite closer listening to the world.