Hearing is believing

It is the greatest challenge in Modern Art: how do you fill Tate Modern's titanic turbine hall with just one work?

Anish Kapoor triumphed with Marsyas, his breathtaking red "ear-trumpet" that curved along the entire 155-metre length of the hall.

Then there was Olafur Eliasson, who trumped Kapoor with The Weather Project, his astonishing "sun" that drew hundreds of thousands to bathe in its light.

Now American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman has come up with ... nothing - except, that is, for a whole lot of noise.

Nauman has conjured up a multilayered aural assault entitled Raw Materials. There are 38 speakers lining the walls of Turbine Hall that create a cacophony of 20 very disconcerting sounds.

These include a man's voice saying "thank you" over and over again, another saying "no, no, no" over what sounds like a whip being cracked, and a child saying: "You may not want to be here."

Depending on where you stand in the hall, certain recordings either dominate your hearing or they are all jumbled.

You can hardly call Raw Materials a must-see - there's nothing to see. But it ranks as a must-listen.

Curator Emma Dexter has been working on the piece with Nauman for about 18 months. She said: "The work has a very different character as you move through the hall. You come in with some quite aggressive and repetitive and slightly hectoring voices as you come down the ramp, then towards the east side of the hall it becomes more gentle.

"I find even the very repetitious ones, such as the recording on the slope with someone saying 'no, no, no, no, no', very moving."

Other speakers, fixed high above visitors to the hall, pump out the one noise that spreads across its entire space - a recording of the artist humming.

Whether Raw Materials will prove as wildly popular as The Weather Project seems unlikely - because where Eliasson's sun calmed stressed, light-starved Londoners, Raw Materials, at least at first, seems likely to cause further anxiety.

However, some visitors to advance tests of the piece have been inspired to dance in the gallery - and, as ever, the Tate has conjured up something completely different.

As Ms Dexter said: "I think every Unilever project is different, and I think people associate Tate Modern with things that might be a bit risky and unusual. From that point of view, this is apposite."

The Unilever Series: Bruce Nauman opens tomorrow, admission free. For more information call 020 7887 8008.