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A day at The Armory Show is likely to leave even the most focused collector with bit of sensory overload. So when the endless number of artworks starts to make your eyes swim, duck outside for a ride in a posh but unconventional limo, where you can sip some champagne, take in the city and open your ears to the AC Institute’s Sound Art in a Limo project.

ArtInfo took a spin around Manhattan with Holly Crawford, curator of the project and founder of the AC Institute. “It’s a perfect space for sound art,” Crawford said of the limo, adding that about 100 artists—including John Baldessari, Kiki Smith and Joseph Beuys—are on the soundtrack, with audio projects that mostly run one to three and a half minutes. (Crawford is present for every ride, armed with a list, and she takes requests.)

Each spin is also a trip down memory lane for Crawford, who created her own sound art piece, The Dinner Party: Play With Me, while teaching at UCLA alongside Doug Harvey in 1995. She said the piece—which includes recordings of children on a playground and a dinner conversation about a sex change—has only been heard twice before, but we talked her into playing it for us.

Another of our favorites was Holly Hughes’ Art Mart, which was delightfully fitting for Amory week: “Art Mart is slashing prices to the stretcher bars on these late-model masterpieces: Schnabel, Salle, Haring,” the speaker boomed. “We’ve got the brand names you want at prices you won’t believe! … Want something that will shock the neighbors for years to come? Let our home-decorating department help you select that very special work-in-progress for any room in the house.”

“An artist doesn’t make any money doing sound art,” Crawford pointed out. “It’s just fun.”

Other projects playing during the Westside cruise ranged from hilarious to beautiful to ominous, including an appropriate piece in which the artist dropped a microphone into the Hudson River.

The atmosphere during a limo project staged last year was a bit rowdier, full of artists and curators discussing the state of the arts, but Crawford said the beauty of this year’s program is its obscurities—most people don’t know that artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Magdalena Abakanowicz dabbled in sound. “You have no idea that they might have done something little like that,” she said.