This is Max Neuhaus, quoted posthumously in a New York Times obituary this week by Bruce Weber, on his installation “New Work (Underground) 1978.”In the Times’s description, “it consisted of a perpetual throbbing growl arising from a loudspeaker beneath a grate in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan”:
The sound creates a space for itself with definite boundaries. You can only hear it within a few feet. But the main audible effect is not so much hearing it as hearing what it does to everything around it. It kind of slices up the sounds of that fountain splashing over there, for instance.
Read the full obituary at nytimes.com.