1967
Drive In Music, 1967 - 1968
A sound Installation for people in Automobiles, Max Neuhaus 1966
(first Drive In sound installation)
1967
The location I chose was a broad, tree-lined avenue called Lincoln Parkway. The work began at the main entrance of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and ran south for a half a mile. The trees along the roadway provided a good location for mounting the transmitters and antennas. I began gradually.
The first work that could be called an installation was actually entitled Drive-In Music. I had the opportunity – I was invited to a centre for contemporary music in a city outside New York City in Buffalo, New York, and because I was well-known as a performer I was given a certain amount of latitude, although they really couldn’t understand what I was talking about when I proposed making a sound work for people in automobiles that they would hear over their car radio as they drove along a certain street. The idea of car - in many American cities, nobody walks; everybody drives, so it was a way of dealing in fact, with the public at large. I realized it with seven low-power radio transmitters, each one transmitted a different sound. I created a topography of sound by configuring their antennae into different shapes. So I literally shaped sound in space; I made a topography out of sound which people drove through. Each listener exposed its elements for himself through his car radio as he drove through it. You could drive through it in two directions, you could drive through it fast, you could drive through it slowly, you could stop… putting sound in place and putting time in the listeners’ hands.'
Max Neuhaus
Max Neuhaus, Drive in Music drawing
In this first aural topography listeners exposed the sounds for themselves over their car radios as they drove through them. The drawing shows the physical shapes of the work's seven sound elements, each of which was broadcast by a short-range radio transmitter.