When listening to music was a team sport

For 120 years—right up until June 1, 1999, in fact, when the file-sharing service Napster launched—you might think enjoying recorded music was something of a chore.

You had to leave the house to find the recording you wanted to hear. (If you even knew his name.) This could take a morning, a month, a year. Once the media artifact, this compact disc, this cassette, was purchased, it had to be inserted into the device and then kept clean, safe and organized if you wanted to hear it again. For loners, there were other challenges: Finding music was non-consensually social, with obstacles like clerks and technicians or DJs if you hunted on the radio.

However, there were also positive aspects. Friendships and rivalries, group listening, LP covers that functioned as common areas, libraries, mixtapes, the thrill of the hunt, forced exposure to the world.

And gear. By a kind of Darwinian selection, devices have evolved to lend dignity, variety, even beauty to this urge we feel to enjoy music without having to hire musicians.

This distant world is now sampled, convincingly and lovingly, through 85 turntables, tube and transistor radios, gramophones, jockeys, boomboxes, Walkmans and more, on view in the “Art of Noise” exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan. Originating at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, where half of its subjects come from, it’s a classic educational show, for reasons both intended and not, and its main attraction is a showcase of the ways recorded sound has filled rooms from 1910 to 2024.

Raymond Loewy’s 1933 classroom-style globe-shaped Radio New World was an almost literal metaphor for transmitting sound through space. (You chose AM frequencies through a window in Cuba.) John Vassos hung his record player for RCA in 1935 as a briefcase, its chrome steel casing lined with red velvet, business class. 1947 Rock-Ola Jukebox — and rock ‘n’ roll jukebox — front lit like a rose window and capable of broadcasting through the haze of any basement bar this portal to a new religion.

It was in the 1960s that form really began to rebel against function. The 1973 Wendell Castle layered laminated and carved walnut stereo chest is the size of a stroller, but with voluptuous, peanut curves and a ridiculous lid. Next to it stands its Brutalist opposite: a 1983 club DJ system made of concrete and rebar, disintegrating like an explosion site, by British-Israeli designer Ron Arad.

Dozens of other functional sculptures here feature some of the most stylish, conversation-starting inventions in home audio. Too bad none are in operation, so the sound quality has to be imagined. At least the show’s inlaid screens play videos of the more visually unpredictable ones, such as Panasonic’s 1971 Toot-A-Loop, a hand-held radio that twists into the shape of a telephone handset.

The curators, Joseph Becker of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Cynthia Trope of Cooper Hewitt, did their best with these limitations. And the labeling of all these clunky items is impeccable.

However, half of the show is on paper: hundreds of advertisements, flyers, concert posters, LP covers.

That was a mistake. Not that Milton Glaser’s “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” poster is boring. It’s brilliant. It was a wallpaper from 1966. (If you want to know how far back Glaser’s Dylan went, visit the American Folk Art Museum across town, where a copy of the poster houses a hand-bound notebook by Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor and painter.)

The problem is that commercial graphics enrich our musical lives today in much the same way they did back then. Even on the screen. (Imagine 2024 without “Brat” green or Arial Narrow.) The printed stuff doesn’t say anything new, and since half of it involves live music, it detracts from the much more original, heartbreaking evolution that this show is really about.

That’s because, love it or lament it, we’re rapidly moving past the age of owned music and beyond the burden, randomness, scarcity, and rarity that once accompanied the cultural diet. Visitors to this Zoomer show may never have bought any music themselves.

Physical media today is a luxury or a statement. This fact is clarified by the ordered parts of this program. Audio design firm Teenage Engineering has provided chairs inlaid with digital samplers that let you manipulate the speed of pre-recorded tracks. There’s other shit.

More sacred is the temporary downstairs listening room by sound engineer Devon Turnbull. Its colossal tweeters and woofers run a wide-ranging, mostly acoustic-based playlist. On Saturday afternoons, a live technician plays LPs and 2-inch tapes on a machine that technicians use in recording studios. Come sit down for a class. After 5 p.m., the entrance fee is pay what you want. (Turnbull also has a permanent room at the Public Records Club in Brooklyn.)

Unlike the listening room, the devices at the heart of this show were designed for everyday use, and looking at them evokes a perverse kind of sadness at how design likes to improve over time.

Check out Dieter Rams, the German god of design, still going strong at 94. Thirteen of his transistor radios, gramophones and tape players for the Braun brand are on display. Most are from the late 1950s and early 1960s – immaculate, Germanic, coolly beautiful fixtures in white and gray and hard soft geometry. They used to be revolutionary. They suggested that listening to music at home could and should be a meditation, almost a laboratory escape from the chaos of the world.

Rams’ influence on Apple’s designers was an open secret. That earth-shaking first iPod, released in 2001 and seen here, was essentially a paraphrase of Rams’ 1958 T3 transistor radio.

Although the T3 isn’t here, enough of Rams’ other designs draw the sad conclusion that innovation has done its job. It’s undeniable when you get to a cluster of iPods and a mirror-black iPhone, Bluetooth speakers that resemble rubber bars, and a pair of AirPods on a pedestal like forceps waiting for a surgeon. These electronics reduced friction until everyone on Earth could feed from the same trough, so no one with Wi-Fi would miss the music they believed they wanted, and no one in that belief would have to talk to another person or risk consuming it.

Art of Noise

Through August 16, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan; 212-849-8400; cooperhewitt.org.