“…i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces: music in vernacular photographs” is a fascinating multimedia work by Steve Roden. I received a copy for my birthday this year from my best friend.

The collection is whimsical, unique, and deeply moving. Unlike a traditional poetry or essay anthology, photograph collection, or album, the book/CD set blurs the lines between text, images, and music/sound effects. The book doesn’t have a table of contents or chapters. The photographs don’t have captions. The associations between sounds, words, and pictures are made by the reader/listener. Interacting with the very object of the book becomes a kind of interpretative act, which the author mediates by means of curation.

This piece makes me wonder how can music become a thing we touch like a book, or a text we read? How can collecting and transmitting sound sound to an audience make composers into curators?