Art of Noise at Cooper Hewitt

TBD

Spread across the entire third-floor gallery of the Cooper Hewitt, Art of Noise traces a century of music design through concert posters, mid-century album covers, jukeboxes, transistor radios, and the Sony Walkman sitting beside an Apple iPod like estranged relatives who agree on everything. The exhibition arrives at the Cooper Hewitt having already proven itself at SFMOMA, and New York has made it its own.

Teenage Engineering—a Swedish electronics company—has designed the exhibition environment itself. The furniture, the interactive playback device, the seating are as considered as the exhibition content, and the whole thing hums with a Scandinavian conviction that good design is simply the correct way to exist.

The show's argument is made convincingly upstairs. It is proven, definitively, downstairs, where Devon Turnbull's HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3 occupies the Carnegie Library and does not ask for your attention so much as simply receive it. Two Denon motor turntables with Groove Master tone arms feed through a step-up transformer (for the moving coil cartridge) into an amp rack housing a DSP unit alongside a 200-watt and a 1,200-watt amplifier. All of this for an experience provided by a Studer CD player. The speakers do the rest: fifteen-cell dispersion horns, mid-range woofers, a super tweeter, and Faustec super-subs resolve frequencies felt before they are heard.