Music and Recording Features

From May 4 through August 18, 2024, the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art (SFMOMA) staged the largest multisensory installation cum performance art exhibition in its history. Entitled Art Of Noise, the multi-room show, which occupied 14,000ft² on the museum's seventh floor, drew an estimated 140,000 visitors, boosting museum attendance by over 33% from the same period in 2023. Even accounting for postpandemic attendance declines, that's an impressive figure.

The exhibit, designed to celebrate "pioneering designs shaping our music experiences," was the creation of two visionaries: Museum Curator Joseph Becker, 40, and New York–based audio salon (footnote 1) host/entrepreneur/system and fashion designer Devon Turnbull, aka Ojas, 45 (footnote 2).

Some particularly nostalgic attendees spent hours gazing silently at 128 early, iconic LP record covers by trend-setting designers who included Reid Miles of Blue Note Records, Alex Steinweiss for Columbia Records, Josef Albers for Command Records, and Laini Abernathy for Delmark Records. I was particularly drawn to the covers for Enoch Light and the Light Brigade's Command Records that caused my mother to exclaim, "Look! First it's coming out of the left speaker, and now it's coming out of the right speaker. It's stereo!"

Many, including yours truly, gaped at 550 floor-to-ceiling concert posters from the heyday of San Francisco's post-Beat psychedelic rock era. The focus was on concerts promoted by Bill Graham and Chet Helms between 1966 and 1971 in venues that included The Matrix, The Fillmore (aka Fillmore West), and the Avalon Ballroom. Others headed to a huge, impressive array of fancifully designed audio devices, including (but hardly limited to) phonographs, digital music players, handheld radios, and surround sound all-in-ones.

In a far smaller space, those who ventured far enough discovered teenage engineering's (footnote 3) somewhat silly choir, a set of eight small sonic sculptures programmed to "sing" synthesized music together, including "I've Been Working on the Railroad" and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." Each sculpture had a name and a specific voice range, eg, gisela and hatshepsut who sang mezzo-soprano. During my visit, at least one of the sculptures was rendered silent by acute laryngitis. Far better to head to Ragnar Kjartansson's The Visitors, a separate nine-screen immersive video installation (footnote 4) on the sixth floor that showed the artist and his musician friends looking extremely artsy as they performed in a historic mansion.

It's all about the music
Without question, Art Of Noise's ongoing immersive listening sessions in "HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No.2" were the exhibit's main attraction. The space, described on signage outside the darkened entrance chamber as one of Turnbull's handful of "shrines to music," was far larger than originally planned for. Well after Turnbull began to design what was billed as a "functional sculpture," Becker shifted from a 36' × 22' space to a huge, high-ceilinged 44' × 51' room with an area of almost 2500ft².

Listening sessions drew, in the last week, its maximum capacity of 100 at a time. Some attendees chose to sit on the floor, either cross-legged, lying down, or reclining on moveable backrests scattered across the floor; others sat in various postures on three-level risers arrayed along the exceedingly long rear wall of the horizontal space. Those in the know homed in on the sweet spot. I eventually discovered that by moving up to second level center, more or less in line with the horns of Turnbull's huge speakers, bass/treble balance was at its best.

This was not an event for silver discs. Nor did I spy a single 0 or 1 whizzing by in less than a femtosecond. Vinyl ruled, played on two turntables with intentional silence between many tracks.

Because Turnbull could only be present some of the time—he led 22 sessions total, some of which he shared with other system "operators"—local deejays filled most time slots. All told, equal authority went to 90 shoeless deejays, including Becker and Turnbull, whose listening choices during their four- and seven-hour shifts varied widely ... sometimes more widely than wisely.

The majority of "operators" were straight men whose playlists reflected their provenance. Some understood what a high-end system is all about; others were guided solely by the music itself, recording quality be damned. As much as everyone was encouraged to play music that might put people into contemplative states—75dB was suggested as a maximum volume level—everyone "contemplated" differently. Some, inspired by the spirit of the space, favored ambient music. Others went for pop, classical, seldom-encountered jazz, Latin, African, or new music esoterica that they thought attendees might not otherwise encounter. Still others mixed dance beats with whatever tickled their fancy and that of their followers, some of whom showed up to hear the choices of their favorite platter spinners on a system far more sophisticated than they were accustomed to. Take a look, for example, at Turnbull's playlist (footnote 5), which he conveniently posted to Spotify for Stereophile readers.

After passing through a long, dark hallway and turning a corner, attendees entered the artfully lit space as if visiting a holy shrine. During my several hours in the packed room, almost everyone remained silent, sitting attentively before the softly spotlit speakers in postures of quasi-reverence. Expectations were so hyped up that many acted as if in the presence of the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, Mother Theresa, Mata Amritanandamayi, or some other spiritual leader. Some sat for hours at a time.

Media coverage, combined with museum publicist Alex Gill's artfully tailored outreach and the unusual appearance of Turnbull's huge speakers, also raised expectations. After the exhibit closed, Dan Gentile, SFGATE senior culture editor as well as a deejay and music producer who held forth in one of the four-hour sessions, dubbed the space "home to the most beautiful sound in the world." Other observers went equally ga-ga.

"You feel like you're seated in the front row at an orchestra, or on a bar stool at a smoky jazz club, or inside Aphex Twin's brain," Gentile wrote. "Listening Room Dream No.2 turns songs into 3D topographic maps." According to him, up to four deejays burst into tears upon hearing how the system rendered their favorite music. How much of that reaction came about because the system acted as a mirror for personal expectations, it is impossible to say.

To visitors, signage described the custom-built system as consisting of "alnico and beryllium compression drivers on brass and steel horns; alnico and paper woofers in plywood enclosures; alnico and beryllium supertweeters; autoformer-based crossovers; lacquered, cotton-covered, copper speaker wire; tube amplifiers; autoformer volume control; tube phono preamplifiers; custom-built turntables; phono cartridges; a digital signal processor; a multichannel class-D amplifier; and a 1970s Studer A80 reel-to-reel tape player." Turnbull elaborated on some of the components during the interview that we conducted inside and outside the museum's restaurant before one of his final deejaying sessions.

On the day I attended, musical colors were muted, treble never gleamed, and bass too frequently tried to bully its way over the midrange. Nonetheless, taking into consideration the hardest-to-tame variable of all, the impossibly large room, the system sound quite good, if not on the same level as the best systems I too infrequently encounter at audio shows. Then again, skilled exhibitors who return to the same exhibit space over and over know best how to tame what can be tamed. First-timer Turnbull, by contrast, was at a distinct disadvantage as he labored to tailor a system designed for one space into something that could fill a space far larger.

"I probably mentioned that the system has room for experimentation and adjustment," he emailed sometime after my visit. "The day you were there, I was running the single-ended 211 amps at a lower impedance than usual. At first, it sounded kind of soft and nice, but when I reversed it the next day, I realized it was much more rolled off than I immediately thought. If you thought the system was lacking some sparkle, that was why.

"I know, odd day to be experimenting. But I only had a very limited amount of time to learn as much as possible about the system. Experimenting and learning is the activity for me!"

As anyone who has ever visited my listening room can attest, I can relate. It's rare to find the self-identified audiophile who never switches components, room treatment, tubes, or tweaks before guests arrive, and who leaves "good enough" alone.

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Footnote 1: Turnbull lives and manufactures in Brooklyn; his showroom is in SoHo.

Footnote 2: See ojas.nyc.

Footnote 3: See teenage.engineering.

Footnote 4: Kjartansson premiered The Visitors in Switzerland in 2012.

Footnote 5: See tinyurl.com/33m4ryvp.