Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

An Afternoon on Sound & Music Design Part 1

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.