Collapsed piano condenses all the strings of a piano into a dense cast block placed on top of a wooden box. Inside the box, a small audio player and a contact speaker transmit piano music directly into the block.
The piano music heard through the block was selected by my father. Rather than being performed by an intact instrument, the sound reaches us through vibration: the contact speaker sets the dense block into motion and the block lets the sound emerge again.
The work asks whether a piano can continue to sound after its own collapse. The strings, which would normally produce sound inside the instrument, have been transformed into a compact, heavy mass. What remains is not the piano as a functional mechanism, but the possibility that its collapse still carries sound.
The block of cast strings becomes both residue and loudspeaker, object and vibration. In that sense, what we hear is still the piano — or at least the piano’s collapse.
