Max Neuhaus

American percussionist and sound artist born in Beaumont, Texas in 1939 who coined the term sound installation and became one of the first artists to use sound as a primary sculptural medium. After a career as a concert percussionist touring with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early 1960s, he turned to public listening situations. His first project, Listen (1966–1976), brought audiences through urban soundscapes with the word stamped on their hands. His Times Square work — a sustained resonant drone beneath a street grate in Manhattan, first installed in 1977 and maintained today by the Dia Art Foundation — remains a defining landmark of sound art. He died in 2009.