Times Square is a permanent sound work by the American artist Max Neuhaus (1939–2009), often credited as the first artist to use sound as the medium for site-specific installation. Installed in 1977 at the north end of a pedestrian island on Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets in New York, it produces a deep, slightly pulsing drone that rises through a subway ventilation grating from a large vault beneath the street.
There is no sign or plaque: passers-by either notice the sound or walk over it unaware, and its pitch and colour seem to shift as a listener moves across the grating. The piece was active until 1992, when Neuhaus moved abroad, and was reinstated in May 2002 by the Times Square business improvement district and Christine Burgin with MTA Arts for Transit and Dia Art Foundation, which then took responsibility for its upkeep. It sounds day and night, a hidden drone inside the noise of Midtown traffic.