1990
Two Sides of the 'Same' Room, 1990

Sound Work Location: Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, Dimensions: 6 x 8 x 3 meters
Extant: January 28 – April 22, 1990

For the work in Dallas, I chose one room [Two Sides of the 'Same' Room, 1990]. I had some alternatives; I had thought about doing two rooms but since I had worked with this form already in Hamburg, I wanted to go on. I ended up going to the extreme – making two sounds in one room. Both sounded the same but created completely different feelings in you, even though consciously you couldn't tell the difference between them.

I really had to work on it. When I am building sound textures, what I am doing is comparing sounds. That's the process, making one sound then comparing it with another, choosing one of them and comparing that with another... The closer I get to the sound I want, the more similar these sounds become. Here, at one point I realized I had two sounds that I could barely tell the difference between, but something different was happening in each. The sounds were very, very different but you just didn't hear it.

I think the confusing thing about explaining this work is that people don't understand how we hear, that we don't hear reality any more than we see reality. We build what we hear in our mind. And I'd found a way to have the mind build, in its conscious perception, the same thing for each sound; but in fact each sound was different. That was the key; that made the contradiction. 

Max Neuhaus