Sound Work Location: Jay Street Subway Station, Metropolitan Transit Authority Building, New York City, Dimensions: 30 x 14 x 5 meters
Proposed: 1971, Extant: 1973–1977
- borough Hall subway station, New York
Image: Max Neuhaus poster
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The first long-term work was set up in New York City in 1973 at the entrance to a subway station, which was also the entrance to a building. A space which hundreds of people walk through every day in the course of their normal activities. People enter the subway through a stairway and come up from it on an escalator. This space has street sounds; it's not a quiet place. One side is also open to a park.
The work was made up of a field of very soft click- or tick-like sound zones forming different configurations at ear level throughout the space. It was generated by sixteen sound sources, four each mounted on each of four pillars, and pointed in different directions to form areas of sound that people walked through. The areas overlapped and mixed; if you were standing in one you heard its source most, but also adjacent ones as well.
The sounds were short; and they varied between being a sharp click to being long, almost like the chirp of a bird. Each one had a separate, independent speed. Because of these different speeds, they combined to form different rhythmic structures, depending on the listener's location or pathway through the space.
There was another factor which changed the piece over a long period of time - the timbre of each source and its speed changed with weather conditions. Temperature, light, humidity, wind speed, all affected, in a complex way, the speed of each individual source and the nature of its sound, making it more of a click or more of a chirp.
I wasn't interested in weather conditions per se; I wanted an ongoing stimulus to change the sound-generating process I had set up. Most people walked through the space as part of their daily routine. I was interested in a level of perception that usually occurs visually. Along routes that we walk very often, we quickly learn the visual environment in detail; but then we gradually stop seeing it because of its familiarity. But if something in it changes from one day to the next, even if it is a very small part of it, the change immediately jumps out at us. I wanted something like this to happen on an aural level.
As these sounds were very soft and mixed with the street sounds, people had the alternative to notice the piece or not notice it and, as they passed through this space daily, to recognize the effect of weather conditions upon different days. The work was anonymous.
Max Neuhaus