There's Not Enough Noise in 'Art of Noise'

The Art of Noise exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt surveys music technology and design spanning more than a century, with a particular focus on portability. The exhibition traces personal memories through various portable music devices, from childhood gramophones and record-eaters to cassette players, boom boxes, and the Sony Walkman. Each device represents a milestone in music consumption and personal taste development. The narrative emphasizes how technological advances in miniaturization and portability transformed music listening from a stationary, living-room experience into a mobile, personal one. These innovations, from radio-to-cassette recording to compact discs, fundamentally changed how people engaged with music throughout their lives.

"The exhibition covers more than a century's worth of music and design - or rather, design for music - and along the way it prompts a whole series of such full-body memories. I can recall a roll call of music machines, each with its own hazards and revelations, each tied to a moment in my evolving taste. It's no accident that my mind goes back to a pocket music maker, because the story that the Cooper Hewitt tells is largely a chronicle of portability."

"We never had a living-room record player, so I didn't buy LPs. Instead, as a teenager I learned from my father to record music from the radio onto cassettes, which I stashed in shoeboxes and popped into players that were rarely larger than a paperback. At one time or another, I wore out a portable radio that was fickle about staying tuned to my favorite station, a top-loading cassette deck, a compact boom box that eventually quacked more than it boomed, a Sony Walkman."

"My Proustian trigger was a portable gramophone designed by Mario Bellini for the Italian company Minerva. As a child, I spent hours in the backseat of the family station wagon entertaining myself with a similar gizmo, shaped like a bright plastic club sandwich. The mangiadischi, or 'record-eater,' would swallow a 45; spin it for four minutes of crackly, tinny song; and then spit it out again with a click and a whimper."

Read at Curbed