The Brooklyn Rail

[See] [Saw] [Sound] [Wave] at Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (FR MoCA) features the work of historic and contemporary artists interested in the acoustic properties of space. It includes recorded works by Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, and Laurie Spiegel, a sound installation by Erik DeLuca, and lithographs and sound-dampening, wall-mounted textile panels by Aviva Silverman. The physical space of the gallery is largely blank, enabling auditory information to replace visual information.

FR MoCA was founded in 2020 by the artists Brittni Ann Harvey and Harry Gould Harvey IV, who are both from and currently live in the greater Fall River, Massachusetts area. It’s a collaborative community space, venue for contemporary art, and larger pedagogical project of the artists; they teach classes at local high schools on social practice and studio art, using the museum as laboratory and as an example of their own social practice. Within this ethos, [See] [Saw] [Sound] [Wave] centers on a social sculpture created by Harry Gould Harvey IV and his collaborators. A pair of whisper mirrors constructed of white plaster are positioned on opposite edges of the gallery, rectangular structures with concave centers that are so large you need to use a step stool to lean into them. Once you do, you can speak at a whisper to someone else across the gallery, in the other mirror, the sound traveling fifty-five feet across the space.

[See] [Saw] [Sound] [Wave] traces acoustic space, defined in sound studies as the area over which a sound can be heard before it drops to the level of ambient noise. Standing next to the sound mirrors, I could hear the faint clicking and static emanations of three sets of wall-mounted headphones, which play recordings by the historic sound artists Alvin Lucier (1931–2021), Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), and Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945). It’s rare to interact with work by these artists installed in a gallery—they’re most often listened to at a personal scale or read as prose-scores or practiced as exercises. In the 1960s and ’70s, Oliveros developed the practice of Deep Listening, which fundamentally distinguishes the passive act of hearing from the investigative act of listening with an aural consciousness that builds up over time, like a muscle. In the gallery, the sets of headphones are open backed, allowing other sounds to bleed in, the recordings superimposed onto external conversations, outside sirens, and Erik DeLuca’s sound piece on the other side of the gallery, which in some moments hums non-invasively and in others emits a recording of a train passing at full volume.

In the second gallery, a small CRT monitor broadcasts a recent performance at FR MoCA of Alvin Lucier’s 1968 prose-score Vespers, which instructs blindfolded performers to use “Sondols” (a portmanteau of sonar and dolphin) to locate each other within an interior space. The Sondols, small handheld electronic devices that emit loud clicks at an adjustable frequency, enable the performers to find one another through echolocation. The title of the work is a reference to Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 composition of the same name. Lucier became interested in how Monteverdi’s piece manufactures echoes through repeated motifs across instruments, and he created Vespers to render a real rather than simulated echo. The work is based on the felt response of sounds reverberating off of the ceilings, walls, floors, and other performers, mimicking the ways in which other animals—bats, dolphins, whales—project and receive echoic information. In [See] [Saw] [Sound] [Wave] a mounted letter from Lucier to DeLuca asks him if he would waterproof one of the sondols, on display below, and try using it at a “refuge where one may swim and play with [the dolphins],” to see if they would respond.

Lucier viewed performances of Vespers as creating an acoustic photograph of their specific space, rendering in sound the unique resonances of the physical structure of the performed area. In 2016, he participated in a series of performances over the course of one weekend in Marfa, Texas, as a part of Marfa Sounding, a “three-year exploration into the acoustic processes of a specific place,” facilitated by Marfa Live Arts and Fieldwork: Marfa. Lucier spoke on panels about sound art over that weekend, and performed some of his well-known works, like Sferics (1981) and I am sitting in a room (1969), a looping performance where the artist records himself narrating a text and repeats the process of playing it back and recording over it, again and again, eventually revealing the room’s unique frequencies. DeLuca, who studied with Lucier, produced Traces Mix, Marfa Sounding for Bathroom (2016/2025) for FR MoCA, which plays over a 2.1 stereo system installed in the metal rafters of the museum’s bathroom. The recordings are drawn from these site-specific performances of Lucier’s that DeLuca attended throughout Marfa Sounding, which are, as he describes in an accompanying text, layered “to highlight moments of resonance, interference, and spatial shifts of sonic mirages.” In loops and echoes the piece, like the exhibition, folds the past into the acoustic present.