"This album collects 40 different responses to one straightforward question: what can be communicated in a single breath? This limitation has inspired a wide range of approaches—some composers have contributed a melody, some have foregrounded a physiological challenge, others have offered a single sound, and others still have created their own playful exceptions to the prompt."

...a group of sound artists and composers was invited to create a set of site-specific interventions in Villakabila, the former embassy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in The Hague. The artists were challenged with a particular task: to make a piece in the form of an installation or a performance, that was to be heard only outside of the room in which it was going to take place. It was requested that each room be left accessible to the audience, but when a visitor would enter a room, any activity enerating sound at that location should cease, as if the intruding visitor was interrupting a private affair.

- from http://eavesdropping.humbug.me/eavesdropping__booklet_web.pdf

"Cornelis Cardew's "Treatise" is an immense graphic score.
It is 192 pages long and comes with no instructions on how to read it.
It fluidly moves between abstract shapes and conventional musical notation,
forcing the performer to question their received notions about both, as they try to make sense of the score.

"Treatise" was designed for humans.
Its raison d'etre is playing in the middle-ground between what is and is not represented.
Cardew wrote the work with his improvising ensemble AMM in mind.
So, is this recording a valid realization of the work?

This is a recording of a printer performing a piece of music.
Perhaps a better audience for it might even be other printers, rather than humans...

...There's no trickery here,
it's not like those internet videos where someone gets computer hard drives to play Radiohead's "Nude",
this recording is just the sound of an inkjet printer printing a pdf of Cardew's "Treatise" until it runs out of paper.
There's no special programming,
and no attempt to get the printer to "play" the work in a way other than the way that naturally happens when you press "Print"...

...There is something about an inkjet printer that seems to suit a
realization of "Treatise" so well.
Human interpretations of "Treatise",
as with most interpretations of graphic scores,
tend to highlight the inability of humans to imagine anything interesting or surprising,
even with a beautiful image in front of them for inspiration.
So it is refreshing to hear a performance which doesn't even try.

- from the liner notes