Volume: Bed of Sound is, as advertised, a bed. It's a giant, pristine futon with 58 sets of headphones. Each headphone is a listening station, and each listening station features a sound work, most of them recent but some from as far back as 1975. The premise seems simple: Lie down, plug in, turn on.

As a matter of fact, it's anything but simple. Bed of Sound (which premiered at New York's P.S.1) is rife with challenges and contradictions about listening, an activity we don't spend much time thinking about. I mean really listening, with both ears, without letting other senses rush in and take over. We listen to music while our minds are occupied with other things: driving, cleaning, socializing. For most of us, it's not a primary activity. This, I think, is wherefore the bed: You make yourself entirely comfortable, and you close your eyes, keeping visual stimulation--which tends to override all the other, less pushy senses--from crowding in. Thus alleviated, you concentrate only on what you hear, in this case a variety of experimental music, performance recording, and sampled noise.

In this vulnerable position, lying down in public with my eyes closed, I realized how seldom it is that I am only listening. Sound is so easily pushed into life's background. It occurred to me as I listened to Vito Acconci's Forcing the Gangster Sister from Chicago to Cry that my ears are not particularly sophisticated. By nature and profession, I'm visually oriented, and I'm unused to processing information aurally. Without clues from my eyes, I often didn't know what I was listening to as I sprawled out on that futon. It was a disembodied, frustrating, enlightening experience, like discovering a muscle I didn't know I had.

Bed of Sound's setup highlights one of careful listening's other frustrating elements: It is not a social activity. Cushy futon aside, I wasn't particularly comfortable. It was nearly impossible to turn off signals from other parts of my brain (Is someone stealing my shoes? Is that teenager done with the Laurie Anderson headsets yet? What's that smell?) and I found myself, like the one time I tried Vipassana meditation, having to drag my mind back. Bed of Sound creates its own paradox--that is, the intimate setup for ultimate isolation--like a lot of people crammed together at a party, but not speaking to or looking at each other.

Distracted in this way, I had a hard time connecting to the work. The Henry's helpful P.R. people had sent me a CD with some of the featured pieces on it, and I kept thinking that I could listen to them again, more attentively, at home. But then I thought, that's not the point. The point is to experience them in this counterintuitive way, while behaving in a most un-gallerylike fashion. This is very interesting indeed, but it kept me from making much progress through the 58 works.

Admittedly, I know little about experimental music. Some of it has echoes of Dada, which I love, with its found noises given as much weight as those created by the artist, as per John Cage's dictum that all sounds are music. And although I recognized some of the artists (the Residents, Amy Denio, Walter Murch, Sonic Youth), and the exhibit's written commentary is very helpful, this isn't really the place to deeply learn much about the discipline. (Perhaps the Henry should issue passes for ongoing admission to the show, so people can return and get used to the odd circumstances. This kind of work requires you to develop an attention span you might not already possess.)

That said, this is a very brave and unusual show. For one thing, there is almost nothing to look at. By my count, there are five visual works, three of which are Susan Robb's Sonitus Mirabile Inventi (Sounds Magically Discovered). In them, through Robb's masterful decoding, we are allowed access to the sounds of inanimate objects. Who knew that an ear made of hair would be such a chatterbox? Or that a set of dust bunnies would croon electronic lullabies to each other? With this bit of visual information, I was immediately made more comfortable. And until I better develop my listening muscles, I shall have to be satisfied with that.