Walk to the south end of the Croton Landing walkway this fall and the soundtrack of the Hudson Line and Route 9 arrives changed. Harmonic Landing, a permanent sound art installation by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, is now in place along the Croton-on-Hudson waterfront, picking up the noise of passing trains and traffic and playing it back, in real time, as harmony.

The village lists the installation as officially opening in fall 2026 at the south end of the Croton Landing walkway. The Village of Croton-on-Hudson's Arts and Humanities Advisory Council met with Odland, one of the two artists and a long-time Croton resident, and backed bringing the work to the park; the Recreation Advisory Committee, which advises the Village Board on donations placed in village parks, supported it as well.

How it works

Microphones gather the ambient sound of the surroundings, the trains and the road. That signal is harmonized and played back through concrete cube loudspeakers. There is nothing added: the music is the place's own noise, reorganized. Visitors are invited to sit on a cube loudspeaker and listen.

The piece spent most of its life under a different name and a different bridge. As Harmonic Bridge, it was commissioned by MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, and installed on Marshall Street under the Route 2 overpass at the edge of the museum's parking lot. There, two 16-foot tuning tubes were fixed to the overpass guardrail; traffic excited the columns of air inside them, microphones placed at the fourth and fifth harmonics caught the result, and the sound was played, unaltered by effects, through cube speakers below. The fundamental note is C. The museum lists the work as on view from 1998 to 2026.

Construction on that bridge meant the installation had to come out. When it did, the artists gave it to Croton-on-Hudson.

The artists

Odland, a designer of the project, is a long-time Croton-on-Hudson resident, which is how a work that greeted museumgoers in the Berkshires for roughly a quarter century came to sit beside the Hudson instead.

Where to hear it

Croton Landing is the village's riverfront park north of the Croton-Harmon station on the Hudson Line; the installation is at the south end of the walkway. The trains the piece listens to are the ones most visitors arrive on.

The village's Arts and Humanities Advisory Council has one more date on its November calendar: the Tony Jefferson Quartet on Saturday, November 21.

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