Several summers ago I traipsed through the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) at its then-temporary digs in Queens, New York. To keep the tourists coming, MoMA, besieged by a disruptive remodel and temporary relocation, cobbled together a mishmash greatest-hits show with the usual big names: Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Rauschenberg, and so on.

Myself, I was there for Van Gogh's magnificent painting, Starry Night, a vertiginous whirl of buzz-saw yellows, whites, and greens blazing through a sea of azure and atramentous blues. To my surprise, the Van Gogh and the other masterpieces merited maybe 30 seconds, or at most a minute, of viewer attention.

Works that incorporate sound stand a better chance of hooking listeners longer, especially those blessed with music-minded ears. I spent a recent afternoon listening to two pieces: Infinitation and Whirl Piece.

The dark vestibule of Yumi Kori's Infinitation leads to a gloriously creaky dock (ah, the pleasures of fresh plywood!) surrounded by a lake of diaphanous orange and white balloons and illuminated by overhanging orange cylinders. The effective soundtrack by Berlin-based sound artist Bernhard Gal, Defragmentation, hums with sine waves all pitch-shifted from high up in the sonic stratosphere down to a hazy treble throb; it's a foghorn heard through an interstellar wormhole.

Ela Lamblin's Whirl Piece, a miniaturized outdoor gazebo of gleaming brushed aluminum, gathers the wind with six soup-ladle-like scoops. A rotating dish touches and triggers small tines and chimes. Whirl Piece is the perfect piece of public art for Seattle: elegant, mild-mannered décor best heard amid the whooshing wind and rain tapping its metal husk. CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI

Sited outdoors, Whirl Piece runs continuously, Yesler Community Center, 917 Yesler Ave at Broadway, 386-1245, free.

Infinitation runs through Sun Jul 24, noon–5 pm, CoCA, 410 Dexter Ave N, 728-1980, $5 donation.