Something Fresh Wafting Up From a Times Square Grate: Art

By SAM ROBERTS

Even in the cacophony of staccato noise that defines Times Square, one sound seems particularly intriguing. Depending on one's ear it is either a continuous oooom-like mantra, a moan, a reverberating bell or an organlike drone.

It can be heard if you stand on or near the grating over a subway ventilation shaft on the pedestrian island where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersect south of 46th Street. You can even detect it sometimes aboard the Queens-bound R, N and W trains before they lumber into the West 49th Street subway station. But no tourist map or sign identifies it.

That is the whole point.

"I wanted a work that wouldn't need indoctrination," says Max Neuhaus, the artist who created the work, which he calls a sound sculpture. "The whole idea is that people discover it for themselves. They can't explain it. They take possession of it as their own discovery. They couldn't do that if it were labeled 'An Artwork by Max Neuhaus.' "

Mr. Neuhaus was born in Texas, grew up in Westchester and attended the Manhattan School of Music. He wanted to be a jazz drummer.

"I happened to be passing through Times Square and I walked across that island and knew I would do something there," he recalled. What he did was create what he called "an impossibility within its context" — a "rich, harmonic sound texture resembling the after-ring of large bells."

Since the artwork, which is called "Times Square," was installed in the subway ventilation shaft in 1977, the sound and its source have been discovered by, among others, a subway track worker. He found the phone number that Mr. Neuhaus had left, and called to say that the machine was making quite a racket. "You better come fix it," he said.

A homeless man moved in after Mr. Neuhaus, who in 1992 was preparing to move to Europe, had disconnected it but had not yet removed it.

Four years ago, several groups and individuals collaborated to bring the sound sculpture back. The collaborators — a Manhattan gallery owner, Christine Burgin; the Times Square Alliance (the neighborhood Business Improvement District) ; Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; the owners of several nearby buildings; and the Dia Art Foundation — spent about $150,000. The sonic instruments and loudspeakers use about as much electricity as a 20-watt bulb.

Laura Raicovich, Dia's director of external affairs, described the sound as "highly experiential — you don't just hear, you step into it, you understand your environment in a different way." She added: "It's an unusual, modulating tone that you can't quite place. That's what sets it apart from all the noise in Times Square. It slows the pace of perception."

Dia commissioned Mr. Neuhaus, 66, to make another sound sculpture, to be installed at its permanent galleries in Beacon, N.Y., this summer.

Sound, Mr. Neuhaus said in a telephone interview from his home in Capri, Italy, "doesn't exist in time, it exists it place," and in contrast to sight, sound is "a more direct channel to the unconscious."

Today, Times Square looks very different from the place that Max Neuhaus happened upon 30 years ago.

"Now, it's been taken over and programmed; it's more deliberate," he said. "But the piece still works."

His "Times Square" is a rare constant at the very crossroad of contained chaos. If you're not on your cellphone or listening to your iPod, you might stop a moment and decide for yourself: What's that sound?