Cooper Hewitt · exhibition field notes

Art of Noise

A century of how design shapes the way we hear music, from the object in your hand to the graphics that sell a scene. Visited Aug 5, 2026; on view through Aug 16 at 2 East 91st Street. Shot on an iPhone between listens.

The OJAS listening room head-on: twin plywood horns, twin turntables, tube amps, USM cabinet and record stand — HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, head-on: twin horns, twin turntables, tube amps between them.

Studer A80 tape deck with OJAS plywood horn speakers behind it — The A80 with the horns waiting behind it.

Listening room in session with visitor and record crates — The room in session: horns, USM racks, crates of vinyl.

Studer A80 close up with tape threaded — The A80 up close, tape threaded and running.

Painted album sleeve on a record stand — On the rack: the day's sleeve, facing the bench.

01The Listening Room

Devon Turnbull / OJAS · HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3

Hand-built horns. The plywood speakers are front-loaded horns: a flared wooden mouth with a multi-cell throat. Horn loading is 1920s cinema tech, so efficient that low-wattage tube amps can fill a room.
The Studer A80. The silver deck is a Swiss reel-to-reel master recorder, the studio standard of the 1970s and 80s. This is the machine records were literally mastered on, running RTM LPR35 tape.
Daily programming. Curated playlists leaning spiritual jazz; a painted-brass-band sleeve was on the rack that day.

Heard in the room

Eight geometric wooden choir figurines against a black background — The eight voices themselves. Photo: Cooper Hewitt.

Choir exhibition wall text — The Choir wall text. No photos do the sound justice anyway.

Virgil Abloh custom silver DJ deck by Teenage Engineering — Abloh's Time Flies deck: a DJ booth as one silver instrument.

02Choir

Teenage Engineering · Sound installation

Eight voices. A set of eight sonic sculptures that sing together, each a different range (soprano, alto, tenor, bass and so on), reimagining choral and chamber music for the synthesizer era and improvising counterpoint on the fly.
The makers. Teenage Engineering is the Swedish house behind the OP-1 synth, so the hardware is as considered as the sound. They did not stop at the installation: the whole exhibition environment is their design, down to interactive seating with a custom playback device for discovering new music.
The Time Flies deck (2019). Nearby: Virgil Abloh's custom DJ rig for his 2019 Coachella set, also built by Teenage Engineering. Two turntables and a mixer rethought from scratch, with an LED display, a modular synthesizer with patch cables, and a sequencer.

Hear them

Long blue table of colorful mid-century radios — The radio table: mid-century cabinets in wood, bakelite, and every color.

Weltron sphere speakers and portable players on the table — Space Age row: spheres, cubes, and a briefcase player.

Close up of yellow Weltron sphere units — The Weltron spheres up close. 8-track futurism.

White dome record player on tulip stand with satellite speakers — Dome player on its tulip stand, satellites to match.

1980s component stereo rack with speakers — The component-rack years: the tower as furniture.

Concept 51K white sound system by Hartmut Esslinger — Concept 51K, Esslinger. The white-box DNA Apple later hired.

White cube record player with control panel lid — The turntable as white appliance, lid and all.

Table of small portable audio devices and headphones — Pocket lineage: transistors, cassettes, early digital.

Edison Fireside cylinder phonograph with label — Edison Fireside Model 8, 1912. Where the table starts.

Tom Sachs Model Thirty-Six cinder block boombox — Model Thirty-Six: a boombox cast in a cinder block.

Rock-Ola 1426 jukebox with Art Deco illuminated front — Rock-Ola 1426, 1947. The jukebox as neon cathedral.

Brionvega RR-126 radio-phonograph with white record player and sphere speakers — The RR-126: the Castiglionis' stereo with a face.

Ron Arad Concrete Stereo, turntable and speakers cast in concrete — Arad's Concrete Stereo. It works, and it plays Blue Monday.

Yuri Suzuki Ambient Machine wooden sound conditioner — Suzuki's Ambient Machine: noise as a design material.

From the collection · the museum's own object photography, for the pieces a phone in a dark gallery can't do justice

Blue Sony Walkman TPS-L2 with orange MDR-3L2 headphones — Sony Walkman TPS-L2 + MDR-3L2, 1979. Photo: Matt Flynn.

Round blue mirrored-glass Sparton Bluebird radio — Sparton 566 Bluebird, Walter Dorwin Teague, 1934. Photo: Matt Flynn.

Panasonic Toot-a-Loop wearable ring radio — Panasonic Toot-a-Loop R-72, 1971. A radio you wear. Photo: Ellen McDermott.

Braun SK 55 radio-phonograph in white — Braun SK 55, Rams & Gugelot, 1963. The snow-white ancestor. Photo: Matt Flynn.

Wendell Castle Stereo Chest carved from laminated walnut — Wendell Castle's Stereo Chest, 1973: hi-fi carved from walnut. Photo: Ellen McDermott.

03The Music-Technology Table

Product design · 1912 to today

Edison Fireside Model 8 (1912). The oldest object in the room: a cylinder phonograph with its brass horn, from before records were even flat.
Rock-Ola 1426 Jukebox (1947). Art Deco light-up cabinet from Chicago. The company really was founded by a man named David Rockola (1927), and pivoted to jukeboxes in 1935; the first jukebox ever was an 1889 San Francisco "Nickel-in-the-Slot" Edison phonograph.
Brionvega TS 502 (1969). The folding two-cube Italian radio by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper. Closes into a clean block; a design-museum staple.
Brionvega RR-126 (1965). The Castiglioni brothers' rolling stereo with a face: dials for eyes, speakers that mount as ears or fold flat. The label had it playing Martha Reeves and The Mamas & the Papas.
Weltron 2001 (1970). The gold Space Age sphere with 8-track and radio. Peak Kubrick-era futurism.
Concept 51K (1970s). Hartmut Esslinger's white hi-fi system. His studio, frog design, later wrote Apple's first comprehensive design language. This box is where that look was born.
Concrete Stereo (1983). Ron Arad cast a fully working turntable, amp, and speakers into rough concrete with the rebar showing. Only ten were made, each slightly different, at his London studio; this one plays New Order's "Blue Monday."
Tom Sachs Model Thirty-Six (2014). Speakers cast into an actual cinder block, roughly 40 pounds, with a handle. A sculptor's joke about portability and haute bricolage.
Ambient Machine (2022). Yuri Suzuki's wooden sound conditioner: a row of toggle switches that mix ambient noise instead of music. The newest object in the room.
The lineage. Braun SK 25 and Crosley "Serenader" radios, a Beomaster 1200, Sony Walkman, Discman, MiniDisc, the original iPod, iPod shuffle, and iPhone. One table from mechanical to pocket-digital.

What the machines play

Wall grid of psychedelic concert posters including The Doors — The psych wall. Doors bottom left, acid lettering everywhere.

Poster wall with Milton Glaser Dylan, Woodstock, James Brown and Hugh Masekela — The icons: Glaser's Dylan, the Woodstock dove, James Brown at the Apollo.

Japanese Summer Jazz posters with isometric typography — Tokyo's Summer Jazz series: type as architecture.

Wall of jazz album covers on blue wall — The sleeve wall: jazz cover design as its own genre.

04The Graphics Wing

San Francisco, Tokyo, and the record shop · 1960s onward

The psychedelic wall. A grid of Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom posters put on by Bill Graham and Chet Helms: The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and more.
The icons wall. Milton Glaser's rainbow-haired Dylan, the Woodstock dove, Hugh Masekela and James Brown at the Apollo: the posters everybody knows, hung side by side.
Beyond the Fillmore. The wing keeps going: a run of Takenobu Igarashi's Summer Jazz Festival posters, axonometric type drawn on a drafting machine for the annual show at Tokyo's Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall, and a full wall of jazz sleeve design. Who played those particular festivals was never published, so the listens below are the Tokyo jazz of the same summers rather than the bills themselves.

Press play on the posters

Deeper into the Fillmore wall

Tokyo, the same summers

Fun fact

“The melting, hard-to-read lettering was deliberate.”

Making you decode the poster was an in-group signal to the counterculture.

Case of hip-hop block party flyers — The hip-hop case: park jams, block parties, Boogie Down.

Case of punk rock flyers including the Dictators — Punk's answer: same copier, different uniform.

Case of folk and rock flyers including Bob Dylan and the Yardbirds — Folk and rock flyers: Dylan before the poster got loud.

05The Flyer Cases

The Bronx and downtown · 1970s to 80s

Hip-hop, born on paper. Original block-party and park-jam flyers: Black Spades and the birth of hip-hop (1973), Kool Herc (1974), plus Run DMC, Slick Rick, and Boogie Down Productions.
Punk next door. The neighboring case runs the downtown scene: the Dictators, Max's Kansas City, xeroxed and stapled.
Folk and rock, the generation before. A third case reaches back: Bob Dylan handbills and Yardbirds shows, when the flyer was still typeset.

The hip-hop case

The punk case

The folk and rock case

Fun fact

“Made by hand with Letraset rub-down lettering and a photocopier.”

No budget, no software; Buddy Esquire and Phase 2 invented a visual language with a copy machine.

London Music Festival 1939 poster by E. McKnight Kauffer — Kauffer, 1939. That bar of type would still ship today.

06One Older Gem

E. McKnight Kauffer · London Music Festival poster, 1939

Ahead of its time. A modernist typographic poster in bold sans-serif and primary colors, proving music graphics as design goes back well before rock.

07Market Watch

What the table would cost you · live eBay asking prices

Object	Live listings	Asking range	Read
Brionvega RR-126	2	$6,919 – $11,750	Genuinely rare: two real units on the market, period.
Sparton 566 Bluebird	1 original	$33,296 (restored pair)	Everything else listed is a modern replica ($20–160).
Rock-Ola 1426	2 machines	$375 – $8,950	Project vs working; the parts market is huge.
Braun SK 55	~3	$598 – $1,449	Serviced examples at the top; sibling SK5/SK61 ask $4k–5.5k.
Brionvega TS 502	~7	$265 – $1,766	Most real units $265–405; reissues also active.
Weltron 2001	~14	$200 – $888	Working spaceballs cluster $200–450; $888 buys restored + Bluetooth.
Sony Walkman TPS-L2	300+	$380 – $3,580	Serviced players cluster $595–1,055; boxed Japan units top out.
Panasonic Toot-a-Loop	~25	$45 – $400	Healthy supply; boxed/NOS earns the premium.
Studer A80	parts flood	n/a	Page after page of parts and manuals; complete machines rarely surface.

Active-listing asking prices as of Aug 5, 2026, filtered to genuine complete units (parts, manuals, and replicas excluded). Sold-price comps sit behind eBay sign-in. Object names link to the live search.

08Dig Deeper

The showArt of Noise at Cooper Hewitt
Listening roomOJAS / Devon Turnbull
Tape deckStuder, the Swiss studio standard
InstallationTeenage Engineering choir
DJ deckSFMOMA interviews Teenage Engineering
RadiogramBrionvega RR-126 at the V&A
Cube radioBrionvega TS 502 at the V&A
SpaceballWeltron 2001, up close
ConcreteRon Arad's Concrete Stereo at SFMOMA
Apple DNAThe Snow White design language
JukeboxRock-Ola, the company
Noise boxYuri Suzuki's Ambient Machine
Psych postersThe Fillmore & Family Dog poster story
Flyer kingBuddy Esquire, hip-hop's flyer master
1939 posterE. McKnight Kauffer

Field notes and photos from a single visit, Aug 5, 2026. Object dates and attributions per the exhibition labels (many pieces on loan from SFMOMA). Collection object photos by Matt Flynn and Ellen McDermott, courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. jamescrews.com