On December 12, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum opened Devon Turnbull: HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, an immersive sound installation that tries to foreground listening as both a sensory and spatial practice. Installed in the museum’s historic Carnegie Library, the project brings together acoustics, furniture, and architecture to examine how sound is shaped by technology and the rooms that contain it.
Sound is inherently physical. It moves through air as vibration, reflects off surfaces, and is absorbed by bodies and materials. Long before it reaches the ear, it is conditioned by volume, enclosure, and texture. Turnbull’s listening room is organized around this premise, treating sound not as background or supplement, but as the primary medium. Visitors are invited to sit, remain still, and listen closely, often for extended periods, in a space designed to minimize distraction and heighten perception.
“Created as a ‘shrine to music,’ this listening room series invites visitors to experience music in a space designed to slow down and reflect, bringing back the joy of experiencing and sharing music together,” Turnbull said. “My intention is to return to the kind of immersive listening we experienced when we were young, free from outside distractions.
Turnbull, a Brooklyn-based artist and audio engineer who works under the name OJAS, is known for handcrafting high-fidelity audio systems that blur the line between functional equipment and sculptural objects. The speakers—large, wooden constructions with exposed horns and precisely tuned components—are designed to reproduce sound with clarity and depth while maintaining a visible material presence. In HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, these speaker sculptures anchor the room, facing inward toward a central seating area arranged with USM Modular Furniture and textiles by Kvadrat.
This presentation is the third in Turnbull’s ongoing series of listening rooms, which began at Lisson Gallery in New York in 2022 and has since appeared in London and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Cooper Hewitt iteration is the largest and most architecturally integrated version to date. Designed specifically for the proportions and millwork of the former Carnegie Library, the installation works to respond to the room’s existing ornamentation and volume, aligning contemporary audio engineering with a 19th-century interior.
The installation also marks the Cooper Hewitt’s first activation of its forthcoming exhibition Art of Noise, organized by SFMOMA. It opens in full in February 2026 and traces how design has shaped people’s relationship to music over the past century, from early phonographs and radios to contemporary sound systems.
Rather than presenting sound as data or spectacle, Turnbull’s listening room seeks to emphasize duration and attention. Capacity is limited, and the installation is programmed daily with playlists selected by Turnbull, rotating by genre throughout the week. At scheduled times, the room is “operated” live by Turnbull and invited musicians, archivists, collectors, and audiophiles, who select and play records in real time. These sessions foreground the act of listening as something shared and situational, shaped by curatorial choice as much as by acoustic conditions.
HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3 is on view through July 19, 2026.
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