Sergei Tcherepnin

Sergei Tcherepnin: My name is Sergei Tcherepnin. 

Narrator: Tcherepnin has used the grid of lights overhead in the Lobby to produce a musical composition. It’s seven hours long, and includes periods of silence.

Sergei Tcherepnin: I am actually transforming eight of the lights that light the Lobby into speakers.

They're speakers, but they're like speaker instruments. 

I don't know the exact amount, but there's around three or 400 lights. You don't necessarily look up all the time, but if you do, you might notice that they kind of look like UFOs. 

Narrator: Depending on where you’re standing, you might hear the composition moving overhead—especially near the bookstore and in the ticket line there may be a spatialized sound, with notes playing all around. People standing nearer the benches or the elevators will hear the composition come together as more of a whole. 

Sergei Tcherepnin: I'm less interested in the spatialization but more interested in the lights becoming instruments and the lights becoming carriers of sound themselves. And, I think given the quantity of lights in the Lobby, I wanted the lights to feel like there's a network of sounding lights spread throughout the gallery that is running through like a spider web.