1967
Fan Music 1967

Sound Work Location: Rooftops of 137–141 Bowery, New York City, Dimensions: 100 x 60 meters
Extant: August 9–11, 1967

Fan Music [1968] one of my first steps in the discovery that I could use audio circuitry as a material to make an artwork out of sound. I found that if I put a photocell across two speaker terminals and covered up the photocell I would get one voltage and if I uncovered it I would get another, a change in voltage, that would move the speaker's cone back and forth and produce a sound. I was starting at the very source of electronic sound with this speaker and moving back and saying, OK, how do I make a work out of this. I had a fan next to me, and I realized that if I put the photocell behind it, the fan blade would create shadows on the photocell as it turned, and then realized that the shape of the shadow determined the timbre – the angle of the fan blade changed the timbre because that shaped the shadow which then became the waveform. And then realizing that it was light that was making the sound; therefore this whole thing could grow and change with light, appearing in the morning and disappearing in the evening. Then placing these fan-speaker photocell systems in various locations on the roofs to form a sound topography. I think I called it a concert, but it was an installation. It went on for three days; it arrived each day when the sun arrived and disappeared when the sun went down. People came and went when they wanted; there was no specific time when it started or ended.

 The rooftops of Manhattan are the remains of its land surface; it's the result. It's an outside space that's open, that's there. You think of Manhattan from the street as being enclosed canyons, but in fact there is still all this space up there, as much space as the island has. All the surface of Manhattan is in fact still there, it's just that large parts of it have been elevated to the levels of the rooftops. New Yorkers think of it as a place of solitude; when people cook up there it's the outdoors of Manhattan. But I wanted to build, to grow something on this surface. It wasn't interpreting this roof and saying this is a great place to be, or interpreting the city by making tapes of what the city might have sounded like a hundred years ago and playing them on the roof. It was growing a new imaginary place, a place from my imagination, on top of this new terrain.

 It was a sound terrain built out of your proximity to a source, mixtures of different things depending on how close you were to each source. You walked through different zones of different mixtures superimposed on the real terrain, the ground, this artificial land of Manhattan. It had a different nature depending on where you were, that's the basic element that's different from music. It moves it into physical space and out of time. Meaning in speech and music appears only as their sound events unfold word by word, phrase by phrase, from moment to moment. The step, the jump, the leap that I made was taking sound out of time. 

Max Neuhaus 

News: The Village Voice, 1967 (Fan Music)