I call it the entrance, because if you do not go through this refocusing you do not get through to the work. Some people call my work meditative because of this need to focus. I don't like the baggage the word carries. These works demand only attention; they cannot be consumed in passing.

With each place and each condition it is a different kind of problem to get that to happen. To get it to happen in a museum is more difficult. In the work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, there is exactly that situation: everyone knows the piece is there, but many people walk through it and do not hear it.

This is an important point, a deliberate point of making the sound almost plausible within the space. It also leaves it hidden and means you can only find it by bringing yourself to the point where you can hear it. A beautiful thing about the piece in Chicago is that, although its sounds are huge and loud, because of the plausibility of these sounds, many people still after fourteen years deny it exists.

On the other hand, I sometimes construct an almost physical place with sound. The piece in Times Square is a good example; it is outside, in the middle of a large open plaza. It's a large block of sound, which you walk into. Even though invisible and intangible, it is like a solid place in the middle of this open space.

Times Square is not a place where you expect cultural intervention; if there is one, you expect to see and hear it. It was not hard to make something that people had to find in that situation. There, there is no need to alter your aural focus; you alter your contextual focus when you find that work.

In very subtle works like Three to One, the 'almost plausibility' of the sounds are things that draw you in, in a different way than if the sound were overt either in its character or in its loudness - the quality that it is both there and not there.

You change the scale of how you hear. When you change scale, you start to look at things differently. When you look at painting your visual scale also changes. The same thing can happen with sound.

There is a wonderful contradiction in Three to One that not many people see, although they all hear it without realizing it. The three spaces, although visually distinct, are for the ear one large space because of the opening for the stairway connecting them in their centers. Yet when you first encounter these spaces you hear separate sounds on each floor, three distinct layers in what is acoustically one space.

It took me a while after I had finished it to figure out how I had done it. In fact, certain parts of each floor's sound spread to all the spaces. These common components are perceived completely differently, though, when they mix with the sounds specific to each floor. By utilizing the components that go between all the floors in a different way in each place, the same thing on each floor is heard as something completely different.

But this changes after you have been in the work for a while.

After you've heard these common components in their three different contexts, your memory comes into play. The sounds of the three floors fuse into one whole with many variations - the perceiver's perception of the unity.

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