Born 1968 in Freiburg, Andrea Neumann studied classical piano at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. She has been active primarily as a musician and composer in the fields of new music and experimental music since 1994 and has co-organized “Labor Sonor,” a series for experimental music, film and performance in Berlin since 2000. Her exploration of the piano for new sound possibilities has led her to reduce the instrument to its strings, its resonance board and the cast-iron frame. Playing this unmounted ‘leftover’ of a piano, with the help of electronics to amplify and manipulate the sound, she has developed several of her own playing techniques, sounds, and ways for preparing the instrument. For reasons of weight, a lighter special instrument was crafted in 2000 according to the measurements of the original heavier inside piano (piano builder, Bernd Bittmann, Berlin).