‘Soundings’ provides the hear and now at MoMA

Enid Alvarez/New York Daily News

The “Microtonal Wall” at the Museum of Modern Art’s “Soundings.”

It doesn’t have a catchy melody and you can’t dance to it. But MoMA’s innovative new exhibit “Soundings: A Contemporary Score” explores what we hear in a way no song or concert could.

It’s the museum’s first-ever sound-based show, with pieces that examine auditory aspects of our lives we normally take for granted.

Naturally, it’s “immersive.”

In one piece, visitors sit on a New York subway bench tricked out with devices that send vibrations shuddering and coursing through their bodies. It’s sound you can feel. In another piece, pitches and tones the human ear normally can’t detect — created by fish, insects and bats — become audible, connecting us to a secret world of communication. Another work visualizes music imagined by an artist who’s deaf.

“We hope the show makes you think about how sound impacts your life,” says its curator, Barbara London.

“We all walk around New York with our ear buds in our smartphones and tablets creating this soundtrack for our lives. In that same way, artists are creating audio environments that are carefully tweaked so we can experience them together.”

Sound Art isn’t new. John Cage blurred the boundaries between conceptual art and music 60 years ago.

“Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” is MoMA’s first-ever sound-based show.

London herself has curated sound-pieces dating back to one by Laurie Anderson in 1978. She also curated a show which bridged aural and visual art, using musicians ranging from Steve Reich to Yoko Ono.

For this effort, the museum gathered only contemporary pieces that focus entirely on the properties, effects and use of sound itself.

Many of the artists have formal musical training. Sergei Tcherepnin, who created the amplified subway bench, holds a conservatory degree. “He told me, ‘If I went to my former professors and said, “Listen to my piece with the bench,” they’d croak,’ ” London says, with a laugh.

The piece that features sounds the human ear normally can’t hear —made audible by especially sensitive mikes and by fidgeting with frequencies — has a surprising formality.

“It’s a composed cycle,” London says. “It starts with underwater sounds, with clicks of the bugs. Then you hear the surface of the water, from the artist’s canoe moving through. Then, it moved upwards to sounds bats are making in the air with their navigation system.”

The piece, “Ultrafield” by Jana Winderen, takes place in a dark room to help us concentrate. The shadowy environment amplifies the sense of this “music” as a found horror film score. The clicks and creaks might appeal to the darkest side of Trent Reznor.