'New music' composers often seek to hybridise traditional sounds or instruments in order to reveal unexpected qualities of chance and change. While these new events seek to be divorced from traditional concepts of music, the history of composition offers the tools with which new ideas may be explored.

The prepared piano is a traditional instrument in which objects are inserted between the strings to hybridise the sound. By perceiving Grafton Gully as the case of an instrument, any architectural body inserted within changes its natural sounds and visual aesthetics. A building itself holds within it many spaces which can be inserted in a similar way. The spaces themselves may be 'prepared' using a variation of textures and materials that alter their acoustical and visual properties.

Within the urban context, the performance space is situated within the cemetery, just below Grafton Bridge. The zone between the disturbed cemetery and motorway incisions is one of dynamic interaction between the tomb ( an acoustically reverberant 'black' box) and the kinetic energy of the traffic. The myth of Iscaurus describes the transition between the depths of the labyrinth to the light. The labyrinth becomes the womb from which Daedalus devises the wings for flight. It is a place of silence as well as birth into the dynamic changing qualities of the surface.

Grafton Bridge defines the acoustical volume. within which the building is placed. This occurs through the existing reverberant piers (caused by the vibration of cars) and the sound of strings (induced by the pedestrians walking along the pavement resulting in a 'Piano' action on tensile wires).

There are several buildings on the site in key positions that are determined by sight lines to other features within the valley. These Sound boxes (amplifiers or performance spaces) may be moveable depending on the demands of different musical installations or sound sculptures. The primary performance space (illustrated by the model) is therefore not a final stopping point on one's journey within the winding paths of the gully, but a transition zone, a place of the moment where the filtering of sounds and shadows communicate to those without and within the building.