A trip to MoMA is a journey into a world of clean cut, white-painted lines and planes…until you exit the lobby and reach the exhibits. There, a cacophony of colors, shapes, and dimensions may greet you, or a cacophony of  unusual whirring, beeping, and humming, if you choose to enter the “Soundings: A Contemporary Score” special exhibit. Open from August 10th to November 3rd, this exhibit showcases the work of 16 innovative artists exploring the relatively new realm of sound art. This exhibit houses a melange of works, from immersive videos with sound to unusual instruments producing a range of intriguing to annoying sounds.

As the visitor walks through the first corridor of the exhibit, she is greeted by a wall filled with individual miniature speakers, each emitting a different frequency. Though the placard indicates that this piece is producing amplified “white noise,” intending to draw the visitor’s attention to ignored sounds in a communal listening experience, it sounds more like an annoying buzz in your ear that would be cause for you to look around the room for something to shut off. It’s almost relieving to find that the next piece is one without sound, an illuminated microphone from the early era of amplification. This lone microphone, intended to memorialize performers of a past musical era, is a thought provoking work which invites the viewer to contemplate its multifaceted meanings, unlike the previous piece, which practically chases the visitor away. This placement of this silent piece in a sound art exhibit also focuses on the lack of sound symbolizing a “missing performer.”

The disparity between these two first pieces illustrates the overall effect of “Soundings” — part thought-provoking, part irritation-provoking.  Some pieces were rather contrived, and the plaques explaining the artist’s idea seemed overwrought and far-fetched. The most significant pieces were the immersive experiences, such as one darkened room that emitted frequencies normally inaudible to humans, transposed to audible pitches. That particular piece was actually frightening if you lost yourself sufficiently in the listening experience of the world of insects and small animals. The whirring and chirping sounds became quite creepy as the imagination wandered to giant mythological insects. The reversal of roles between humans and tiny life forms suggested by this piece reminds the visitor of our relative smallness in proportion to larger forces of the universe, and our unawareness of entire biospheres. Likewise, the construction of a huge water tank which gave a visual representation of tiny inaudible frequencies was an apt reminder of how much we are unaware of.

The impact of this exhibit is heightened by the novelty of sound as an art medium. (This is considering sound art as a realm separate from music, where sound and hearing are the primary focus of the artists’ creations, which cause the listener to have a certain experience. Of course there may be some crossover between music and sound art.) As experiencing sound art is not mundane to visitors to the museum, artists showcased here have a greater opportunity to convey their message with significance. Some visitors still did rush through without giving the art a chance to convey its message, but others were wrapped up in the experience. A visit to this exhibit would be best done alone, or with a quiet friend.

Considering the many goals and interpretations of sound art, this exhibit does a masterful job of displaying the many facets of this art form. Some pieces showed a combination of sound and visual, even kinesthetic sensation, or merely a visual representation of sound in fascinating ways. This being said, it would have been fortunate if the layout of the exhibit were made more easy to follow, or at least to have a flow to them. Several times, I turned around to realize that I had missed a room that looked like a janitorial corridor, or had walked in a circle and missed another room. It would have been helpful for an overview of the entire exhibit to be presented at the entrance, or for a clearer path to be marked out.

If you have a taste for the avante-garde and enjoy art that provokes thought, Soundings: A Contemporary Score is a very interesting experience. In the middle of noisy New York City, this environment facilitates careful listening — a welcome break from trying to tune out traffic noise.