Play It By Ear is an interactive sound sculpture inviting a neighbourhood to talk to itself.
13 brightly coloured telephone pillars are placed throughout Butler Memorial Park in Edmonton/Treaty 6. Each pair of colour-coded telephones is connected by looping ‘landlines’ curling underfoot.
Play It By Ear by Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett, 2023
Telephone components, metal, electronics, acrylic, vinyl, sidewalk paint
This blog features photographs by Caitlind Brown, as well as drone images and photos by Karl Domning
Park visitors can pick up any telephone and a matching phone will ring elsewhere in the park – like a hard-wired walkie-talkie system. If nobody picks up, you’ll be connected to a voicemail where you can leave a message for your neighbours – and listen to the messages they’ve left for you!
Conceived during the COVID pandemic, the installation proposes a whimsical way to shorten the distance between people, creating shared experiences, conversation, and empathy.
Play It By Ear is an intergenerational play structure designed to connect people of all ages and backgrounds.
As a way of grounding the phones in the community, the public was invited to submit photos of “a place that feels like home,” and these images were used to create the layered dioramas for the circular telephone windows ornamenting the face of each phone.
At night, the windows glow like portals into another world.
The final phone is black. This phone is an “Easter Egg” – a discoverable surprise. Instead of calling a phone of a matching colour, the black phone calls all the phones in the park at once.
The image in the circular telephone window is an aerial view of the park.
Play It By Ear invites you to participate! Visit Butler Memorial Park to try the installation, meet a stranger, or leave us a voicemail after the tone.
Or you can read through this full blog to learn more about how (and why) we created Play It By Ear!
For a full list of credits, contributors, and thanks, visit this link.
Play It By Ear 
One response to “Play It By Ear”
[…] Play It By Ear is a sound based installation using telephones to connect people across short distances. The idea of making hard-wired telephones for Butler Memorial Park came from listening to the place. We were thinking about how the park is used like a living room and ways to enhance the feeling of home, of knowing the people around you. At the same time, we were visiting the park and learning about the neighbourhood. We couldn’t ignore the giant cellular tower beside Butler Memorial Park – a newer addition to a historic brick Alberta Government Telephones (AGT) building. […]
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