WHERE WE GO TO LISTEN
The Art of Noise at the Cooper Hewitt
I never chose to listen to NPR growing up, but I did listen to a lot of it.
I remember the long drives to the Unitarian church in Dallas, kicking my feet in the back seat, being briefed on everything from geopolitical tensions in the Middle East to racking my brain for the answer to Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. (Please tell me — I’m only seven.)
My parents listened to a lot of 80s music, and as a kid who fully believed he was destined to be a cowboy, I listened to my fair share of country music. But when we listened to NPR on those Sunday drives, I got to hear a different kind of music. John Schaefer’s voice was in there somewhere — steady, curious — hosting New Sounds, which he’s now been doing for decades.
At the time, I didn’t know what I was listening to. I just remember the worldliness of it. The sense that the music came from somewhere real — from rooms and rooftops and cities that felt far away from a car moving through Dallas. Between the monotony of a Texas highway and the intrigue of hearing a didgeridoo for the first time, the music gave me a third space. Not home, not church. Somewhere else entirely.
The other night, I found myself sitting inside Andrew Carnegie’s former library at the Cooper Hewitt, listening to John Schaefer again.
I was there for the opening of The Art of Noise, an exhibition exploring how design shapes the way we experience music. At its center is Devon Turnbull’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, an immersive installation built directly into the historic library. Turnbull is known for his custom speaker systems and spatial sound work — previous installations for clients like Solange and projects like Public Records in Brooklyn have established him as someone who treats sound as architecture.
"Created as a 'shrine to music,' this listening room series invites visitors to experience music in a space designed to slow down and reflect, bringing back the joy of experiencing and sharing music together," Turnbull said. "My intention is to return to the kind of immersive listening we experienced when we were young, free from outside distractions."
What surprised me about the conversation between Schaefer and Turnbull wasn’t genre or gear, but their focus on rooms and presence. At one point, they played Musique de Nuit — kora master Ballaké Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal, recorded live on a rooftop in Mali.
You could hear the air. Ambient road noise in the distance. The open sky above the instruments. It was airy but full, the kora and cello remaining present and clear. The Carnegie library absorbed the sound without fighting it — intellectual without being overbearing, grand without being loud, quiet without feeling empty. For a moment, I wasn’t in New York. I was on that rooftop.
Music shapes the space you’re in when you give it your attention. Good listening rooms are designed to support it.
Turnbull’s system doesn’t try to overpower the Carnegie library or retrofit it into a concert hall. It works with what’s already there — the proportions, the materials, the fact that this wasn’t built for amplified sound. The installation becomes a stage that accommodates the recording, giving the music space to transport you.
That kind of focused listening feels rare now. Music has become frictionless, ambient, endless. Listening rooms set a different tone. They narrow the field and make the act of listening the point. It’s part of why we’re seeing a resurgence of listening bars in the U.S. — spaces modeled after Japan’s jazz kissas, where patrons sit in near silence with meticulous sound systems. As postwar Tokyo apartments shrank, kissas became places to be alone, together.
Sitting in that library, listening to the same voice that once filled the backseat in Dallas, I realized something I couldn’t have articulated as a kid: I was using music to build other worlds. The minivan wasn’t designed to be a listening room. Neither was Carnegie’s library. But when you listen with intention, music creates its own architecture. It makes space inside the space.
The Art of Noise is on view at the Cooper Hewitt through August 16, 2026. Devon Turnbull’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3 operates during select hours with live programming. If you’re in New York, it’s worth sitting in.
