1978
With this work for MoMA, I knew from the beginning that I had a way to make very low sounds.
There was a ventilation chamber beside the building, and I saw that it could be turned into a subsonic loudspeaker.
I built it and started tuning. I just took it down, down and down. It could go down to ten cycles per second; we stop hearing sound as sound at about twenty-five, so this is a full octave and a half below where we stop hearing sound. It was the opposite end of aural perception than the work in the "Rooms" exhibition at PS1 – the lower threshold.
I began trying textures, high and medium, but with this incredible bottom end. I soon noticed that some of the lows were actually resonances of the whole garden, and then one day I came back and I said, what is all this? I've got it right here, this is it, I'll just use the inaudible part. It was a nice moment, saying to myself, turn it around, turn it over.
Max Neuhaus