Max Neuhaus was renowned for his interpretation of contemporary music while still in his twenties. In the early sixties, he toured America as a percussion soloist and gave solo recitals at Carnegie Hall and in European capitals.

Neuhaus went on to pioneer artistic activities outside conventional cultural contexts and began developing art forms of his own. Utilizing his sense of sound and people’s reactions to it gained after fourteen years as a musician, he began to make sound works which were neither music nor events and coined the term ’sound installation’ to describe them. In these works without beginning or end, the sounds were placed in space rather than in time. Starting from the premise that our sense of place depends on what we hear, as well as on what we see, he utilized a given social and aural context as a foundation to build a new perception of place with sound. With the realization of these non-visual artworks for museums in America and Europe, he became the first to extend sound as an autonomous medium into the field of contemporary art.