The Biggest, Oddest (and Most Unique) Sound in New York

The notes are so shrill, minute and foreign to the human ear that we react with sensitivity to them. "Most music changes as it goes past your ears," says Grimshaw, "but in the Dream House it stays still if you stay still, but it changes dramatically if you move." So the visitor has the ability to manipulate his experience in the Dream House. "If you turn your head a little you can make a pitch come into focus, turn back and it will disappear again. If you stand up on your toes you may find that the tones are different two inches higher," he says. Tugging an earlobe, tightening the jaw or sneezing can also alter the pitch.

Most listeners, after getting used to the sound, tend to find a soothing and relaxing quality to the drone. There are even some people who enjoy lying down and napping to it. "We have one guy who comes in after work every Thursday and stays in the room for three hours," says Rob Ward, the coordinator of the Dream House. "He sits and meditates. It seems like he goes to a different place." A blonde out-of-towner named Burette visited the Dream House for the first time recently and emerged an hour later dazed and visibly relaxed. "It feels good. It's like when you're on a beach and there's that droning of the surf, in and out," he says. "You can have dreams. I went to that other place."

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela have been creating sound and light environments as a team since they got together in 1962. The pair are anything but typical. At 74 years old Young looks like an ornery Hell's Angel. He wears a black denim biker's jacket slightly open to expose some chest hair, wristbands, a bandanna and shades, and he has a devilish white beard and goatee. Zazeela has artfully braided hair and almost always wears either magenta or purple; the two colors that feature most prominently in her art. Due to the intricate nature of their work they maintain a 36-hour sleep schedule: roughly 23 waking hours and 13 sleeping hours. "Our work is very complex and it takes time to get into it," they say. "Our lives are dedicated to the process of offering unique phenomena to the world."

Young is widely considered to be the father of minimalism (or the "granddaddy of us all," as Brian Eno once referred to him). His most well known work, "The Well-Tuned Piano," is a six-hour solo piano piece that slowly induces its listener into an immovable trance-like state. Some call it the most important piano work of the late 20th century. "La Monte's work as a performer ... takes people into new realms of understanding," says Zazeela. Zazeela was one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a serious medium for expression. Her emotive magenta lights and shadow creating mobile designs help give the Dream House its greatest sense of escapism. They reside below the hum of Dream House in their apartment on the second floor and say living with the sound is "like heaven on earth."