NET RESULTS:Warsaw is using MP3 technology, music and park benches to mark Frédéric Chopin's 200th birthday this year, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

THERE IS a park bench in Poland that plays Chopin. Actually, there are 15, as I discovered. They are part of a little Chopin tour for those who come to Warsaw and wish to know more about this very famous son of the city. Most people probably just accidentally stumble upon one or two during a city ramble.

The other 14 black stone multimedia Chopin benches throughout the city are at various locations associated with the composer. They are one of the city’s special gestures this year to honour Frédéric Chopin’s 200th birthday. What a wonderful, inspirational use of technology they are.

The bench I saw sits at the edge of a leafy little park next to an old church of the Visitation Nuns that managed to survive the Luftwaffe’s carpet-bombing during the second World War – one of a tiny number of original buildings in Warsaw’s city centre.

Inside the church is an organ which the young Polish composer is said to have played during church services – or to be precise, Chopin was employed to play the church’s organ for services. The existing organ probably has bits and pieces that have been there since when Chopin played. He was a student at the nearby Warsaw Lyceum.

He wrote to a friend in 1825: “I have become the school organist. Thus my wife, as well as all my children, must respect me for two reasons. Ha, Good Sir, what a man am I! The first person in the whole school after the Revd parish priest! I play once a week, on Sundays, at the Visitandines’ on the organ, and the others sing.”

I went to look at the church – lovely and cool in the midsummer heat. An elderly nun was arranging flowers on the altar. I wondered whether the schoolgirls who attended the services back then found their young organist as dashing and tempestuous as his later reputation would have him.

I learned much of all this from the bench. Engraved in the surface were some basic details about the particular location and its Chopin connection. There was also a little diagram of the tour that lets you see at which bench you currently sit.

That’s just the analogue side. The benches are especially interesting for their digital features. Press a button on the surface and you get to hear about half a minute of a Chopin piece – coming from the bench, which is lovely, if initially slightly disconcerting, as you try to figure out where the sound is actually coming from. You don’t really expect the source to be a bench.

Embedded inside each bench is a small MP3 player and speakers (apparently, the batteries are replaced roughly every month by bench caretakers). Each bench plays a different snippet of music.

It is lovely to hear a dreamy piece of piano playing in such an unexpected way.

Also set into the surface are a pair of large, two-dimensional barcodes. If you want more Chopin information, you can scan either barcode (if you have downloaded a barcode reader programme to your phone or your handset has one installed, as many now do).

This takes you to a website with more detail about Chopin, music downloads and other information.

The benches are an intriguing way to do more than just offer static information to passers-by. They enable a visitor to get a quick bit of contextual detail then and there, but also to retrieve a wealth of additional content then or later. How perfect to be able to actually hear the music in a relevant outdoor setting, and remember why the man is celebrated in the first place.

When, in so many instances, technology is used more as a high-tech toy or an indifferent add-on purveyor of additional information in a museum or gallery which no one really wants, I found this simple enhancement of a living, outdoor space to be utterly charming.

All the more so for being – as I am sure it is for most people – an entirely serendipitous discovery while in an unfamiliar city.

Only time will tell how robust such an outdoor use of MP3 players will prove to be, or whether these barcodes – extremely popular in Japan – will catch on here to the degree that makes this kind of use more widespread. But these little stone benches certainly suggest technology can be put to much more intriguing, thoughtful and creative uses on the tourist and museum trail than is currently the case.