For 120 years — until June 1, 1999, actually, when the file-sharing service Napster went live — the enjoyment of recorded music on your own terms could be something of a chore.
You had to leave the house to find the recording you wanted to hear. (If you even knew its name.) This could take a morning, a month, a year. Once bought, the media artifact, this compact disc, this cassette, had then to be fed into equipment, then kept clean, safe and organized if you wanted to hear it again. For loners, there were additional challenges: Finding music was nonconsensually social, with roadblocks like clerks and technicians, or D.J.s if you hunted on radio.
There were upsides, however. Friendships and rivalries, group listening, gatefold LP sleeves that doubled as joint-rolling surfaces, libraries, mixtapes, the thrill of the hunt, forced exposure to the world.
And gear. By a kind of Darwinian selection, devices evolved to lend dignity, variety, even beauty to this urge we feel to enjoy music without having to hire musicians.
That distant world is now sampled, convincingly and lovingly, by the 85 phonographs, tube and transistor radios, turntables, jockey decks, boomboxes, Walkmans and more on view at the “Art of Noise” exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan. Originating at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where half its objects come from, it is a classic educational show, for reasons both intended and not, and its main attraction is a pageant of the ways that, from 1910 to 2024, rooms have filled themselves with recorded sound.
Raymond Loewy’s New World radio from 1933, shaped like a classroom-style globe, was an almost literal metaphor for the transmission of sound through space. (You chose AM frequencies through a window in its Cuba.) John Vassos hinged his record player, for RCA in 1935, like a briefcase, its chrome steel shell lined in red velvet, business class. The Rock-Ola jukebox of 1947 — the jukebox of rock ’n’ roll — lights up in the front like a rose window, able to broadcast through the haze of any basement bar this portal to a new religion.
It was in the 1960s that form really started to rebel against function. Wendell Castle’s stereo chest in stack-laminated and carved walnut, from 1973, is big as a bassinet but with sensual, peanut-y curves and a ridiculous lid. Beside it stands its Brutalist opposite: a club D.J. system from 1983 made of concrete and rebar, crumbling like a blast site, by the British Israeli designer Ron Arad.
Dozens of other functional sculptures here represent some of the most stylish, conversation-starting inventions in home audio. Shame that none are up and running, so the sound quality must be imagined. Inlaid screens in the show, at least, play videos of the more visually quirky ones, like Panasonic’s Toot-A-Loop of 1971, a hand-held radio that swings out into a telephone receiver shape.
The curators, Joseph Becker of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Cynthia Trope of the Cooper Hewitt, did their very best with those limitations. And the labeling of all these clunky objects is impeccable.
Half the show is on paper, though: hundreds of advertisements, handbills, concert posters, LP sleeves.
This was a mistake. Not that Milton Glaser’s poster for “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” is boring. It is ingenious. It was the wallpaper of 1966. (If you want to know just how far Glaser’s Dylan stretched, visit the American Folk Art Museum across town, where the notebook of Henry Darger, the reclusive janitor and painter, lies hand-bound in a copy of the poster.)
The problem is that commercial graphics today enrich our musical lives in essentially the same way as back then. Even onscreen. (Imagine 2024 without “Brat” green or Arial Narrow.) The print things say nothing new and, with half of them relating to live music, they detract from the far more original, even heartbreaking evolution that this show is really about.
This is because, love or lament it, we are speeding past the age of owned music, and past the encumbrance, serendipity, scarcity and preciousness that once attended the cultural diet. Zoomer visitors to this show may never have bought any music themselves.
Today physical media is a luxury or a statement. The fact is made clear by the commissioned parts of this show. The audio design firm Teenage Engineering has provided chairs inlaid with digital samplers that let you manipulate the speed of preloaded songs. There are other shticks, too.
More sacred is the temporary listening room downstairs by the audio engineer Devon Turnbull. His colossal tweeters and woofers run a playlist of wide sonic range, most of it acoustic based. On Saturday afternoons a live technician plays LPs, and two-inch tapes on the kind of machine that technicians use in recording studios. Come sit for an hour. After 5 p.m., admission is pay-what-you-wish. (Turnbull also has a permanent room at the Public Records club in Brooklyn.)
Unlike the listening room, the devices at the heart of this show were designed for daily use, and looking at them evokes a perverse kind of grief for the way design likes to perfect itself through time.
Look at Dieter Rams, the German design god who is still going strong at 94. Thirteen of his transistor radios, turntables and tape players for the Braun brand are on view. Most are from the late 1950s and early ’60s — impeccable, Teutonic, coldly beautiful devices in white-gray and hard-soft geometries. They were once revolutionary. They suggested that listening to music at home could, and should, be a meditation of almost laboratory remove from the mess of the world.
Rams’s influence on the Apple designers was an open secret. That earth-quaking first iPod, released in 2001 and on view here, was basically a paraphrase of Rams’s T3 transistor radio from 1958.
Though the T3 isn’t here, enough other Rams designs draw the sad conclusion that innovation did its job. It is undeniable by the time you reach a cluster of iPods and a mirror-black iPhone, Bluetooth speakers resembling ingots of rubber, and a pair of AirPods on a pedestal like forceps awaiting a surgeon. These electronics reduced friction until everyone on earth could feed from the same trough, so that no one with Wi-Fi lacks the music they believe they want and, safe in that belief, none need speak to another person or engage in risk to consume it.
Art of Noise
Through Aug. 16, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan; 212-849-8400; cooperhewitt.org.
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