Music For A Quarry by Walter Fahndrich is a permanent sound installation located in a former marble quarry near Mass MoCA. A ten speaker array plays music for 15 minutes just before sunset each day.

Laura Heon of Mass MoCA writes:

“Working with the latitude and longitude of the quarry, a computer program begins the music at the same solar time (rather than clock time) each night. The start time (near 8 or 9 pm in summer, near 4 pm at the winter solstice) changes as the spatial relationship between the earth and sun changes. The first tone appears at the precise moment of astronomical sunset, a moment that is both permanently fixed and changing daily. During this fifteen-minute period, the burden of comprehending the physical space shifts slowly from the eye to the ear as the sounds are traced to their sources.”

The installation is closed during winter months.

Luray Caverns is a large cave in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley that features a variety of speleothems (columns, mud flows, stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, mirrored pools, etc.). It’s most notable feature is the Great Stalacpipe Organ, created by Leland W. Sprinkle, a modified organ which triggers solenoid actuated rubber mallets that strike tuned lithophones, transforming the cave and its rock formations into a musical instrument. The organ does not require the use of electro-acoustic amplification, and a number of records and CDs have been made of organ performances.

Hear the organ in action here!

The Sound Playground was designed by art/design duo Bill and Mary Buchen for PS 23 Elementary School in the Tremont region of the Bronx in New York.  Several sound producing elements are integrated throughout the playground such as bronze drums, speaking tubes, audio-visual periscopes, parabolic reflectors and an underground echo chamber.

“Sound mirrors” were built between the world wars (here pictured on the Kent Coast in the UK) as listening devices to detect incoming enemy airplanes. These reflectors fell into disuse with the advent of radar and remain as historic relics of an auditory past.

The Sound Mirror Project has proposed the revival of these devices for communication across the English Channel:

“Visitors to the new mirrors will be able to climb up to a listening platform in front of the mirror in the manner of the orignal listeners at the historic mirrors. Rather than straining for the sound of distant aeroplane engines, people will be listening to the sounds of the sea, as well as for voices speaking to them from across the Channel.

A new advanced acoustic technology will allow transmitted sounds from the other mirror to be audible only at a particular focal point in front of the dish — focused at the small area around the listener’s head. The person standing at the focus point will hear a complete “holographic” binaural sound image which will appear to becoming from the air all around them.”

The clocktower’s role in defining and unifying a community has been the subject of numerous writings by authors such as Daniel Boorstin, Alain Corbin, Barry Truax and R. Murray Schafer. With The Clocktower Project, Christina Kubisch adds a layer of interactivity between the environment and the clocktower, as exterior light conditions trigger a database of recordings of Kubisch’s experimental playing of the bells. The recordings mix throughout the day with the real life bells, which in addition to the clockworks, were restored a few years ago.

The Clocktower Project is located in North Adams, Mass, at MassMoca.

Ringing Rocks Park, located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, gets its name from an 8-acre desolate field of boulders, 1/3 of which give off a metallic ring when struck, due to their high content of iron and aluminum. Apparently visitors to the park bring their own hammers to sound the rocks. According to unmuseum.org: “In June of 1890, Dr. J.J. Ott collected a number of the rocks which rang at different pitches, then with the assistance of a brass band, played a number of musical selections on the rocks for the Buckwampum Historical Society… More recently some local musicians have put together “jam” sessions on the rocks, striking them with various implements, including other rocks, sticks, hammers and railroad spikes.”

Tonic, 2002, is another tube-based sound installation by Bruce Odland in collaboration with Compound Design Collective Bill Bailou and Cecile Boucher. It is located behind a bus stop at San Vicente + Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood, CA. See also: harmonic bridge.

“Sound installation transforming street noise into musical harmonics in real time. The sound of traffic resonates a 12-foot tuning tube on the wall just around the corner and the resulting harmonies are played from these two cement loudspeakers. There is no tape or CD. What you are hearing is the music hidden within the traffic’s roar at this very moment.”

Under a freeway overpass in North Adams, MA one can find the permanent installation ‘harmonic bridge’ by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, located beneath route 2, adjacent to the parking lot of MASSMOCA. Odland has carried out a series of similar installations (one entitled Tonic in West Hollywood, CA) in which materials are applied to the environment to shape or filter the ambient sounds.

Explanation from MASS MoCA’s website:
“Entering the space under the bridge, one becomes aware of a turning eddy of sound in the midst of intersecting streams of traffic. Cars pass by heading north or south on Marshall Street and east or west on the Route 2 bridge, but this linear motion is counterpoised by a rolling, humming C as calming as the rhythm of ocean waves. Although cars stream by, pedestrians lose the impetus to move forward, derailed by this cool pool of sound with its mysterious, chant-like hum. Harmonic Bridge presents an aural cross-section of North Adams, a slice of the city in the key of C, comprised of the fundamental note and its overtone series.

To produce these rolling tones, artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger affixed two 16-foot tuning tubes to the guardrail on the north side of the bridge on either side of the overpass. The length of the tubes determines the fundamental tone: a sound wave at such a low pitch is 16 feet long and must be generated (whether for sound art or a pipe organ) with a 16 foot tube. Inside each tube, a microphone is placed at a certain harmonic interval (the 5th in one tube, the 4th in the other). These locations emphasize the harmonic and give a slightly different timbre to the two Cs. (The difference in timbre between the two tuning tubes is analogous to the difference in timbre between a cello and a violin playing the same note: though the pitch is the same, the sound is slightly different).

As traffic passes by, its noise generates a sympathetic resonance in the columns of air inside the tubes. High-pitched sirens and even voices generate higher harmonics, while the low rumble of trucks creates low ones. The sound is carried from the microphones in the tubes to a control room, where the sound signal is then amplified and transmitted to the concrete cube speakers under the bridge. There are no electronic effects added. The sounds have been simply extracted from the traffic noise above, as one might extract precious metal from a baser substance. The pedestrian hears one tuned layer of city sounds, and strains to separate the harmony from the traffic on Marshall Street. The work requires that we focus our ears on it, and we walk away from the experience as the composer John Cage would have us: hearing music everywhere. The bridge becomes an instrument played by the city revealing hidden harmonies within the built environment.”

This particular overpass is striking because of its remote location, relatively low ceiling, and thick, dry, sandy floor, which filters the overhead traffic noise in a compelling way. Getting there is half the fun - hike through Beale’s Cut off of Sierra Hwy in Newhall, CA. Then walk north-east, following a paved road through an old oil refinery turned superfund site.

The following is an excerpt from Atmospheres - a transcribed lecture by architect Peter Zumthor, published by Birkhäuser, 2006.

“Listen! Interiors are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere. That has to do with the shape peculiar to each room and with the surfaces of the materials they contain, and the way those materials have been applied. Take a wonderful spruce floor like the top of a violin and lay it across wood. Or again: stick it to a concrete slab. Do you notice the difference in sound? Of course. But unfortunately many people are not aware of the sound a room makes. The sounds we associate with certain rooms: speaking personally, what always comes first to my mind are the sounds when I was a boy, the noises my mother made in the kitchen. They made me feel happy. If I was in the front room I always knew my mother was at home because I could hear her banging about with pots and pans and what have you. But there are good sounds, too, in a great hall: the noises in the grand interior of a railway terminal or you hear sounds in a town and so on. But if we take it a step further - even if it gets a bit mystical now - and imagine extracting all foreign sound from a building, and if we try to imagine what that would be like: with nothing left, nothing there to touch anything else. The question arises: does the building still have a sound? Try it out for yourselves. I think each one emits a kind of tone. They have sounds that aren’t caused by friction. I’ve no idea what they are. Maybe it’s the wind or something. But you only really feel there’s something else there when you enter a space that’s soundproofed. It’s lovely. I find it’s a beautiful thing when you’re making a building and you imagine the building in that stillness. I mean trying to make the building a quiet place. That’s pretty difficult these days, because our world has become so noisy. Well, not so much here, perhaps. But I know other places that are much noisier and you have to go to some lengths to make quiet rooms and imagine the sounds they make with all their proportions and materials in a stillness of their own. I realize the sound I am making must remind you of a sermon - but isn’t it more simple than that, and more pragmatic? How does it really sound, when we walk through it. When we speak, when we talk to each other - what will the sound be? And what if I want to sit in a living-room and talk to three good friends on a Sunday afternoon and read at the same time? I’ve got something written down here: the closing of a door. There are buildings that have wonderful sounds, telling me I can feel at home, I’m not alone. I suppose I just can’t get rid of that image of my mother, and actually I don’t want to.”