Hidden Sounds of America: NYC Hum & Underground Organ

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You're listening to 20,000 hertz.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

I love traveling.

When I'm in a new place, outside my comfort zone, I can feel my brain working in a new way.

One of my favorite parts of traveling is hearing sounds that are different than what I'm used to.

When I stayed in Italy, I was struck by how it it wasn't just the language that sounded different.

It was the cars, the mopeds, the birds, the footsteps on cobblestone.

It was a vibrant burst of sonic information.

If you intentionally become conscious about what you're hearing, you can experience this anywhere.

And in some places, you can find sounds that you can't hear anywhere else in the world.

Even here in the US, there are some truly unique sounds that you need to know about.

This episode features two stories from one of my favorite podcasts, Atlas Obscura.

There have actually been a handful of 20,000 Hertz episodes that were directly inspired by the posts I found on the Atlas Obscura website, so I'm really excited to play you some of their show.

I'll let producer Johanna Mayer take it from here.

Times Square is not my favorite part of New York City, but today, that's where I'm headed.

Okay, where is this thing supposed to be?

Don't actually know where I'm supposed to be going.

Alright, so it's on Broadway between

45th and 46th.

Okay, this way.

It's a perfect early fall day in Manhattan.

Oh, there's Elmo.

Oh, this is where like all the characters are.

There's Spider-Man, there's Mickey, there's Minnie, there's Pulk.

I am not here to take in the usual sights of the area.

The hustle and bustle, a Broadway show, the M ⁇ M store.

I'm here because I'm looking for a grate and a sound.

Obviously, there are a lot of greats and sounds in Times Square, but I'm looking for one in particular.

Oh, maybe I haven't gone quite far enough yet.

Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Here's a big grade.

If there's a hum down here, I'm not really hearing it.

Maybe I do hear it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is it.

For sure.

Okay, I had to really, really listen for that.

I would have walked over that.

I probably have walked over this.

It takes me a second to find the hum I'm looking for, but once I do, I cannot unhear it.

There's nothing to draw your attention to this sound.

No plaque, no signage, but the hum is actually a piece of art.

It's a decades-old sound installation by an experimental composer named Max Newhouse.

He was the pioneer in the world of sound art, and he wanted to to make work that, quote, didn't require indoctrination.

In other words, art that didn't require learning about it in a textbook or visiting some tucked-away gallery.

The piece is officially called Times Square, but it's often just referred to as the hum.

The sound rises up out of a grate on a pedestrian triangle on one of the busiest sections of one of the busiest streets in the entire world.

It's right in the thick of the bright lights and ads where the ball drops on New Year's Eve.

It occurs to me that the Hum might be the most visited piece of art in the world.

About 30,000 people visit the Mona Lisa every day and about 300,000 people pass through Times Square daily.

The difference, of course, is that very few people realize that they're visiting a piece of experimental art when they're here.

I stand there for a while watching people pose for pictures right on top of the grate.

I have a question for you.

Can you hear this like hum underneath us that we're standing on?

Do you hear sort of like almost like bells or like a little hum?

No, no at all.

Do you think you ever would have noticed this?

No I would not have.

It's like a sound art.

I'm trying to see if people noticed it.

You didn't notice it at all?

I noticed it.

When you tell me, we just notice.

I feel like I look a little crazy.

I'm like asking people if they notice.

Totally silent noise.

Eventually, I catch the eye of someone else who's clearly not a tourist.

Someone who, just like me, is out here working in Times Square on a Saturday afternoon.

You're the naked cowboy, right?

I'm the naked cowboy, and I'm keeping the rear for you.

Hold on.

If you don't know the naked cowboy, it's pretty much exactly what he sounds like.

A dude wearing nothing but cowboy boots, a a cowboy hat, and tidy whiteys.

He's kind of a fixture in Times Square.

Well, I have a question.

So, did you know that this is like an outdoor art installation game?

Yeah, yeah, they got some stupid freaking thing here.

It makes a

noise.

So, how did you find out about it?

Well, I've been here for 25 years every day.

Do you stand over this thing often?

Well, I mean, in the winter, it

generates a little heat, but not much.

Sing a song for you.

He lies crying

So cute.

Look, I gotta let you go.

I'll take a picture.

What's the value in adding one more sound to one of the noisiest streets in America?

Max Newhouse called this hum part installation, part social experiment.

And that was kind of his thing.

Newhouse was born in 1939 in Texas, and he started his artistic life as a composer.

He began to make a name for himself in classical music circles, and he got really into experimental contemporary and percussive music in the 60s.

In the late 60s, Newhouse began making what he called sound installations.

He installed speakers in an arboretum and piped in electronic sounds to make it feel like some sort of oral plant food.

Another time, he linked a radio station with a phone network and asked people to call in, and then mixed up the sounds live on air.

In 1977, Newhouse built the hum.

He climbed into a vent shaft underneath a grate and installed a speaker and homemade electronic sound generators that he somehow connected to a nearby street lamp for power supply.

It hummed away until 1992, then it was disconnected.

But as the years went by and Newhouse got more famous, a gallerist worked to get the hum reconnected.

It started up again in 2002, and it's been down there ever since.

Even during a period of construction in 2015, when scaffolding covered up the grate and people couldn't lean in close, it was never turned off.

It just kept humming into the ether.

After a lot of lurking around and awkwardly sticking my recorder at what looks like a regular old subway grate, I see a couple of youngish guys crouching down over the grate.

They're side by side, but not talking.

Heads bent down.

Could these be my people?

Excuse me.

Can I sorry to interrupt?

Can I ask you guys a couple questions?

I'm a podcast reporter.

Are you listening for the sound design?

So you guys actually know about it?

Yeah.

Oh, that's so exciting.

You're the first people I've talked to all day who can actually hear it.

Yeah, yeah.

We gotta like really focus and like zone in a little bit.

Oh, my name is Rishob.

I'm his brother, I'm Rahul.

So what brought you guys here?

Yeah, I actually knew about this.

I was writing a screenplay for a film.

I'm a film major.

And I kind of wrote wrote the sound installation into my film I was looking for things that was not like something somewhat hidden in New York and not like not something very common that people would expect so

yeah this this felt like something that was very spiritual you know in the middle of something that's very crowded

yeah

what does it sound like to you

they're like these Buddhist bowls you know that just it's kind of like this oscillating reverberating sound that's calming and droning, almost like

something's being birthed or created out of thin air.

Like the Tibetan singing bowls.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

How would you describe it?

I hear also Aum, which is the sound of creation in India.

So I just hear like a group of people sing Aum.

What do you think is the point of having a piece like this that there's no explanation, many people will will just be walking across it and never realize it.

What value do you think it brings or what makes it worthwhile?

It's not just the sound itself, it's everything around you as well.

So it's like

the horns, the people walking, people talking, the cyclists riding.

And then

when you just focus in on sound and you're not thinking about visuals,

that resonation gets louder and louder and it permeates through everything else.

So,

I mean, in a way, it's almost like it's New York talking to you, you know.

If you want to experience the Times Square hum, walk along Broadway till you get to a pedestrian island between 45th and 46th Streets.

Look for a large triangular grate.

It's maybe 20 feet long.

The hum is loudest at the north end of it.

And then

just

listen.

You might hear New York talking to you.

After the break, we'll leave the city behind and explore a deep cave in Virginia to hear the largest instrument in the world.

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Congratulations to Kaz Mori for getting last episode's mystery sound right.

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This chime was composed in 1978 by Yasushi Inada.

Here he is in 2015 playing the melody on piano.

And here's this episode's Mystery Sound.

If you know that sound, submit your guess at the web address mystery.20k.org.

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In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there's a network of dark, cold caves called Le Ray Caverns.

That's Dylan Thuris, the host of Atlas Obscura.

A path leads down into the cave, and it takes you past Dream Lake, a big pool with this calm, reflective surface.

And all around it, there are a ton of stalactites hanging down from the ceiling and stalagmites reaching up from the ground.

It's this jaw-droppingly beautiful space.

But wander a little further into the cave, and your jaw might drop a little more.

Because there, in the middle of the cave, is an enormous organ.

And this isn't your average church organ, because instead of pipes, every key of this organ is connected to a tiny mallet that hits a different stalactite.

So my parents came to me and said, well, for your birthday, you get your choice.

We can have a birthday party, or we can take a trip to a cave.

And I said, the cave.

That's Robert Sprinkle.

He's about 70 now, but this is a story that takes place when he was just a little boy.

In 1954,

when we went to the cave, I was five years old.

And that's where the magic happened.

That cave they visited was Le Luray Caverns in Virginia, part of the Shenandoah National Parks.

But long before it became a national park, millions of years ago, the LeRay Caverns were underwater, part of an ancient sea.

And slowly, over the years, the water drained, leaving these large, dark caverns behind.

As water slowly dripped down from the cave ceilings, minerals would accumulate bit by bit, forming these gigantic stalactites.

They hang from above like these gigantic stone icicles, up to 500 feet long.

And for little Robert Sprinkle, it was an absolutely magical place.

I declared to my mother, I was only five and I had a little bit of trouble enunciating at that point.

This is the best boot day anybody's ever had.

Toward the end of the tour, tour, we got to a place

where a very large piece of what used to be the ceiling had broken off and it had a row of fairly small stalactites.

The guide we had took this little rubber rod and struck several stalactites and played Mary Had a Little Lamb.

In that instant, my father imagined the entire project that would occupy him until his death in 1990.

He thought of the whole thing.

He thought of what it would need.

He knew he could do all parts of it.

Robert Sprinkle's father was Leland Sprinkle.

And Leland Sprinkle's idea was this: to build a giant organ right there in the Luray Caverns, and to do using ancient stalactites in the place of the pipes.

At the end of the tour, Mr.

Sprinkle rushed to the visitor center and asked to speak with the owner.

The person selling souvenirs pointed to Mr.

Graves' office, and Leland Sprinkle marched in, stoic and determined.

Here's his son, Robert.

He said, Look, this is who I am, an electronics engineer at the Pentagon.

I work on the UNIVAC computer, and I could turn your cave into a musical instrument.

The UNIVAC computer was the first general purpose computer and the Pentagon was the very first place to have one installed.

These machines were very large and very rare.

So in other words, this guy, Leland Sprinkle, was next level smart.

And the owner, strangely,

said,

Okay,

see what you can do.

And they shook hands, and there you go.

I mean, looking back on it, I think, I mean,

it was really kind of nuts.

This kind of agreement could

literally never happen now.

It's pretty hard to imagine the national park system letting someone come in and just chisel at the ancient stones.

In that period, that never came up, you know, defacing rocks or something.

It might have been the last era in which

that could have been done.

In the two-hour drive home, Robert's father was quiet.

Whatever excitement his father had for this project, he didn't show it, at least not outwardly.

Here's Robert.

No, not giddy.

My dad wasn't a giddy kind of guy, rather taciturn.

He was lost in thought, as far as I could tell.

Purposeful and optimistic, I think, would be fairer.

By the time they arrived home, Leland had composed, in his head, a list of all the materials that he would need.

And he got straight to work.

So he started constructing the electronics upstairs on a table

that my son now uses for his computer.

A cherry table, actually.

It's a very nice table.

He often was bent over

soldering things, you know, and I soldered some things too, so I helped now and then to the extent I could.

There was no textbook for building a giant organ in a cave, a giant organ made of a cave.

And so Robert's dad had to invent all these parts and processes along the way, especially when it came to the waterproofing.

My dad thought, well, maybe we could just coat it with something.

So he got a lot of beeswax and a hot plate, and then I would dip the magnetic pickups in the beeswax.

And I would do this repeatedly until a sufficient coating had been applied.

On weekends, the entire family, Leland Sprinkle, his wife Harriet, and their two small boys, would drive the two hours to Shenandoah Valley.

And Leland would work long days in the Lurray caverns.

And then afterwards, he'd come home in the evening and take off his muddy boots just outside the apartment door.

Since my father realized that what he was doing would sound crazy, he encouraged me and my brother not to discuss it.

And we didn't.

We didn't tell anybody.

And it was kind of strange because when he would come home, he would put his boots, which were covered with mud, on the front porch.

And anybody could walk by and wonder, you know, what is this guy, a grave robber?

No, not a grave robber.

Just a math and science genius from the Pentagon building a pipe organ in an ancient cave.

Robert's right.

It sounds pretty wild when you say it out loud.

But it also sounds really beautiful.

He approached it as an artist would approach a very big, you know, like the Sistine Ceiling or something or Mount Rushmore.

He wanted it to survive him.

He wanted people to understand it

and be moved by it.

Now here's another thing to know about Leland Sprinkle, the engineer.

He was a musician.

He was trained as a concert organist.

He gave recitals on the radio.

Before he had a wife and kids and a job at the Pentagon, Leland Sprinkle spent a semester studying with a world-famous organist at the Peabody Conservatory in Johns Hopkins University.

We called the music school and confirmed Leland was there for one semester as a special student.

So this pipe organ was a true labor of love for Leland, something kind of only he could have made.

This was a way to merge not just his interests, but his abilities.

There was no personal ambition in this, but there was an artistic ambition and an engineering ambition.

Leland worked as nine to five in the Pentagon and spent his weekends in the Le Ray caverns, scavenging around to find just the right stalactites.

In the end, only two of the stalactites he picked were naturally in tune.

The other 37, he meticulously shaved down to get them to play the exact right pitch.

An organ was brought in and set up on a platform, and each key was wired to a tiny rubber mallet, which in turn lightly tapped its chosen stalactite, which then rung out a perfectly tuned note.

The entire cave was a musical instrument.

After three years of work, the organ was finally ready for its debut.

On June 7th, 1957, a small audience gathered for the inaugural concert inside the cave.

Leland Sprinkle came out and took his place.

He sat down at his creation and started to play.

In the audience was the Washington Post music critic, Paul Hume.

He drove to LeRay

and he sat there being dripped upon by stalactites from the ceiling.

Mr.

Hume was known for his harsh reviews, someone who was notoriously tough to please.

But he sat through the concert without complaint.

And when it was over, he loved it.

And not only did he love it, he actually named it.

He called it the great Stellac Pipe Organ.

And my dad loved the name, and so that's been the name applied ever since.

Leland Sprinkle continued to work on the organ for years.

We talked to folks who worked at the caves with Leland Sprinkle, and they said he always showed up in a full suit and tie.

And he was kind and serious.

He would work until late in the night, until 2 a.m., not knowing that the sun had set outside, tinkering, tweaking, improving the organ for the rest of his life.

For Leland, this is where his love of music and his love of engineering came together.

The music of the natural world with a little dose of mathematical genius.

No one else would have done it, and he was intent that it be done well.

He thought he had given humanity a gift to be able to hear music that was millions of years old and had been waiting patiently to be heard.

Leland Sprinkle passed away in 1990, but the great Stalac pipe organ lives on.

And what you're hearing now is a recording of Leland himself playing the Stellac pipe organ in the Luray Caverns.

So let's let Leland play us out.

If you visit the Le Ray Caverns, be sure to stop in the cathedral room, where you'll find the great stalak pipe organ.

Over the years, millions of tourists have passed through these caverns and heard this music.

To preserve this special instrument, visitors visitors are not allowed to touch the organ, but no worries, you can still hear the music.

There's a button you can press and the organ will spring to life and tap out a melody on the various stalactites that Leland Sprinkle tuned by hand.

Those stories came from the Atlas Obscura podcast, a short daily celebration of the world's strange and wondrous places.

On their show, you'll hear about a crystal cave in Mexico, a wishing tree in Portland, Oregon, an alien grave site in Texas, and so much more.

The show is super well-produced, well-written, and consistently awe-inspiring.

Subscribe to Atlas Obscura right here in your podcast player.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

Find out more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was reported by Heidi Shin.

Our production team includes Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Camille Stanley, Willis Ryder-Arnold, Sarah Wyman, Manolo Morales, Tracy Samuelson, John DeLore, Peter Clowney, our technical director is Casey Holford.

This episode was mixed by Heidi Shin.

I'm Dylan Thuris, I'm Johanna Mayer, and I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.