An Afternoon on Sound & Music Design Part 1

Why It Matters

The program shows that integrating acoustic design with architecture and visual branding can create immersive environments, opening revenue streams for cultural institutions and redefining how brands engage audiences through sound.

Key Takeaways

• Exhibition "Art of Noise" explores design’s role in music experience
• Speakers become architectural spaces inviting bodily interaction and immersion
• DIY speaker design bridges club culture and professional audio engineering
• Modular sound installations transform public venues into responsive acoustic environments
• Visual graphics like album art shape music memory and cultural identity

Summary

Cooper Hewitt’s “Art of Noise” program opened with a two‑part afternoon that examined how design shapes music over the past century. Curator Alexander Hodkowski introduced the exhibition, which pairs spatial speaker experiments on the third floor with a visual archive of album covers, posters and flyers on the first floor.

The first segment featured four designers—Deborah Garcia, Moy Yasin, Zoe Mat and David Shaw—who demonstrated speaker systems that function as architecture, community tools and DIY artifacts. Garcia described her “record sound system,” a feedback‑loop tower installed at a public library that “inhales” at sunrise and “exhales” at sunset, turning a building into a living vocal box. Yasin recounted building a custom dual‑12‑inch Tractrics horn for Stone Island’s Paris flagship, exposing the speaker’s internal ribs to make sound visible.

Mat and Shaw’s Waves and Frequencies loudspeakers blend furniture design with acoustic engineering, while Garcia’s “super system” at Harvard—a foldable, billboard‑inspired sound wall—illustrated how modular structures can become performance stages despite campus noise restrictions. A recurring theme was the desire to “inhabit the speaker,” letting bodies occupy and interact with the sound source rather than merely listen.

Together, the talks underscore a growing recognition that sound is not just an auditory layer but a spatial, tactile medium that designers can sculpt. By merging architecture, DIY culture and graphic branding, the exhibition points to new business models for venues, brands and museums seeking immersive, multisensory experiences.

Original Description

In Part 1, dive into the world of contemporary speaker design with fast-paced presentations by New York’s rising audio innovators—Deborah Garcia, Mo Yasin, and Zoë Mowat and Dave Shaw of Waves and Frequencies. Learn about their strategies for spatial activation, home audio enhancement, and live event sound system set ups.

Then, for Part 2 (https://youtu.be/Wa4dN5lsxKI), enjoy a dynamic conversation where writer and curator Vince Aletti speaks with DJ partners and publishers Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele of Love Injection. Together with moderator Matthew Higgs, they’ll unpack the visual language of album covers, posters and flyers. Discover how music’s graphic design including typography, color, and production techniques help shape memories and history. Expect a lively show-and-tell as Aletti and Love Injection share stories and rare examples from their experiences documenting, collecting, and distributing this cultural ephemera.

Learn more about the Art of Noise exhibition https://www.cooperhewitt.org/channel/art-of-noise/.