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Laurie Anderson is a musician and artist I've liked for a long time.

She will be 60 this year and has been very active in music and art for almost 40 years. In the 1970s she created "The Handphone Table," a table that plays music via a method called "bone conduction." To hear the music that is playing in the table, you sit at it with your elbows on the table and your hands over your ears. The sounds seem to come from inside your head.

The table now travels around to various museums. I don't know if visitors are allowed to sit down at it and listen with their bones, or if it is merely an artifact to gaze upon.

I've also been thinking a lot about the music scene in Blacksburg. Compared to the heyday of 10 to 20 years ago, when multiple venues had live music four nights a week, the scene seems pretty small. But if you sit down at the table, you can still hear the music.

I remember the days when Blacksburg was full of places for bands to play, and not just college-age dudes in cover bands. Blacksburg seems to have fallen off the radar for the smaller national acts that used to come through.

I saw the Flaming Lips play at what was last known as the Red Cross Center on Draper Road, now just another empty eye socket in the downtown landscape. I saw the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz at the South Main Cafe. I saw the Asylum Street Spankers and Fishbone play when it was Baylee's and used to go there to dance to the True Sound regularly.

Guitarist and music store owner Richard Jessee speculated recently in an article about his decision to leave town that college kids aren't interested in live music anymore; they are only into football and house parties and hooking up. I assume football and drinking and hooking up are pretty important, given the popularity of home games, the downtown meat-market bars and the continual references to "the hookup" in the Collegiate Times' columns.

But I also know that students and townies are still interested in live music. We don't have as many official venues or as many nights a week, but even so, this month I could go see the old-time Black Twig Pickers at the Cellar, the nationally known Ben Folds in Burruss Hall, rockers Labianca at Boudreaux's, the old-school ska Pietasters at Martin's in Roanoke, the unique funk of "That One Guy" at the Sun Music Hall in Floyd, the jazz duo M.U.G.A.B.E.E. at the Lyric Theatre, reggae artists Sol Creech and the ever-popular Kind at Champs, the WUVT alumni homecoming show in Haymarket Theatre, Curious Strange at Attitudes, and punk, stoner doom and electropop at various house venues.

And that's just a sample of what is going on.

The house venues bubble behind the scenes like Stroubles Creek running under downtown Blacksburg. I helped organize and host shows at a Blacksburg house, from local acts to bands from Georgia, New York and Japan. Fifty of those shows were probably repeat performances by Johnny No-Friends, the Spiral Joy Band and Hideki Tojo, but it was a lot of music nonetheless.

For the low cost of hanging up fliers downtown and mopping up the next day, we had our house full of musicians and music lovers pretty much any time we cared to get it together.

I often check getrockedout.com for lots of pointers to interesting musical things going on in our part of the world -- in houses, on campus, in clubs, bars, restaurants, and the occasional grocery store, wrestling ring and other alternative venue. And you can always walk around and read the ubiquitous fliers downtown. I know some folks aren't crazy about them. I've always wondered why the town didn't set aside bulletin board space specifically for fliers. I bet people would use them. Fliers might not look great plastered all over the fronts of empty storefronts, but that phenomenon points to a lot bigger problem than flier-hangers. That's a subject for a future column.

Many are eagerly awaiting the opening of the Rivermill's new space on College Avenue and Awful Arthur's in Kent Square. These two new musical venues will be a welcome addition to the downtown soundscape and perhaps help put Blacksburg back on the map as a tour stop for bands.

As Dan Dunlap, the new co-owner of Jessee's Rocket Music, pointed out to me recently, the music has changed in Blacksburg over the years, but it's undeniably still there, still flowing, even if it's partially underground.

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.