Kevin Beasley’s performances often push sound to the extreme. To witness one is to experience sonic vibrations as a visceral physical sensation. Sometimes, uncomfortably so. In “I Want My Spot Back” (2011–2012), for example, the artist turned up the volume on a cappella tracks pulled from old hip-hop albums and blasted them throughout the Museum of Modern Art’s central atrium, eliciting noise complaints. For “Your Face Is/Is Not Enough” (2016), performers breathed into megaphones, revealing emotional, and even spiritual, aspects of the basic bodily function. Beasley is particularly interested in magnifying low-frequency sounds that permeate our everyday lives. “When you’re not hearing something, it’s because the matter that it’s moving through isn’t carrying it, and it gets dispersed,” he says on Ep. 47 of Time Sensitive podcast. “And that shift—whatever that thing is, that’s either limiting it or amplifying that sound—there’s a major consequence to that.” Every wave involved in a particular sound is imperative to making sense of the source that produced it, he continues, as well as of the space you experience the sound within. “The vibrations become a way of understanding your body and its nuances—its age, its trials and tribulations. It’s like everything that you’re experiencing gets conjured up through [them].”