Zadar's Sea Organ..sounds like an ideal place for Ted Stevens

Y'see it's a series of tubes...real ones..& the sea plays music on it...24-7
http://www.janera.com/janera_words.php?id=137

Click to hear it...
http://www.janera.com/janera_words.php?id=137&feature=player_embedded">




Zadar's Water Music


The impulse to promenade is strong in Croatian culture. In almost every limestone Old Town dotting the country's coastline, promenades fill daily in the late afternoon. By the time the weekend rolls around, from morning until night these walkways are particularly dense with humanity: families, gangs of teenagers, couples, solo strollers, and of course the constant ebb and flow of tourist amoebas—those groups whose members wear matching hats or vests and who speak conspicuously in non-Slavic languages. In the coastal town of Zadar, all these people, local and foreign, come to amble and talk to one another and listen to Croatian architect and artist Nikola Basic’s sea organ, a public art piece that manages to harness the undeniably human impulse to mingle. The structure—part architecture, part sound, part science—is a point of convergence and conversation.

Basic collaborated with Dalmatian stonemasons, who seamlessly carved the organ directly into the promenade's walls, completing the project in 2005. The sea pushes air through the organ's underwater pipes resulting in unique ambient musical chords that float down the walkway, changing in intensity and tone as the sea moves. The project, which is the only sea organ of its kind, recently received the European Prize for Urban Public Space.

Traditional Croatian music uses melodies and harmonies in the diatonic major scale (a scale that roughly translates as the successive playing of the white keys on a piano). The five musically tuned pipes of each section of this organ are arranged to create chords that obliquely reflect this traditional style. Each organ pipe is blown by a column of air that is a direct result of a column of wave-moved water. From any given point on the organ's fifty feet of steps someone can experience several grouped chords at a time. So in addition to reflecting the music of the tides and movements of the ocean, the organ also reflects the culture of the residents on the shore.

Approaching the organ at dawn on my first visit, not a soul was on the boardwalk and I was struck by the peaceful pastel tones of the sky and sea reflected in the smooth stone. As I sat to capture the sounds of the organ with my minidisc recorder, the sea pushed its way through the organ, slowly humming me awake. The morning wore on and pedestrians began to appear along the shore. Boats began drifting in and out of the port, their wakes changing the intensity of the organ's tones. My initial plan was to interview people about their impressions of the organ, but after the first few conversations I realized that I would be engaging in a much larger social commentary about the nature of peace and conflict in the area.

much more about this cool place on our planet