On a recent trip to the Alaskan interior, I didn’t get to see the aurora borealis, but I did, in a way, hear it. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called “The Place Where You Go to Listen”—a kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that magical idea, the mechanism of “The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

“The Place” occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season. What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which Adams has named the Day Choir. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series—the rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string—and have the brightness of music in a major key. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. Pulsating patterns in the bass, which Adams calls Earth Drums, are activated by small earthquakes and other seismic events around Alaska. And shimmering sounds in the extreme registers—the Aurora Bells—are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights.

The first day I was there, “The Place” was subdued, though it cast a hypnotic spell. Checking the Alaskan data stations on my laptop, I saw that geomagnetic activity was negligible. Some minor seismic activity in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was a rather opaque ripple of beats, suggestive of a dance party in an underground crypt. Clouds covered the sky, so the Day Choir was muted. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change: the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Certain that the sun had come out, I left “The Place,” and looked out the windows of the lobby. The Alaska Range was glistening on the far side of the Tanana Valley.

When I arrived the next day, just before noon, “The Place” was jumping. A mild earthquake in the Alaska Range, measuring 2.99 on the Richter scale, was causing the Earth Drums to pound more loudly and go deeper in register. (If a major earthquake were to hit Fairbanks, “The Place,” if it survived, would throb to the frequency 24.27Hz, an abyssal tone that Adams associates with the rotation of the earth.) Even more spectacular were the high sounds showering down from speakers on the ceiling. On the Web site of the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, aurora activity was rated 5 on a scale from 0 to 9, or “active.” This was sufficient to make the Aurora Bells come alive. The Day and Night Choirs follow the equal-tempered tuning used by most Western instruments, but the Bells are filtered through a different harmonic prism, one determined by various series of prime numbers. I had the impression of a carillon ringing miles above the earth.

On the two days I visited “The Place,” various tourists came and went. Some, armed with cameras and guidebooks, stood against the back wall, looking alarmed, and left quickly. Others were entranced. One young woman assumed a yoga position and meditated; she took “The Place” to be a specimen of ambient music, the kind of thing you can bliss out to, and she wasn’t entirely mistaken. At the same time, it is a forbiddingly complex creation that contains a probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction. On the one hand, it lacks a will of its own; it is at the mercy of its data streams, the humors of the earth. On the other hand, it is a deeply personal work, whose material reflects Adams’s long-standing preoccupation with multiple systems of tuning, his fascination with slow-motion formal processes, his love of foggy masses of sound in which many events are unfolding at independent tempos.

“The Place,” which opened on the spring equinox in 2006, confirms Adams’s status as one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century. At the age of fifty-five, he is perhaps the chief standard-bearer of American experimental music, of the tradition of solitary sonic tinkering that began on the West Coast almost a century ago and gained new strength after the Second World War, when John Cage and Morton Feldman created supreme abstractions in musical form. Talking about his work, Adams admits that it can sound strange, that it lacks familiar reference points, that it’s not exactly popular—by a twist of fate, he is sometimes confused with John Coolidge Adams, the creator of the opera “Nixon in China” and the most widely performed of living American composers—and yet he’ll also say that it’s got something, or, at least, “It’s not nothing.”

Above all, Adams strives to create musical counterparts to the geography, ecology, and native culture of his home state, where he has lived since 1978. He does this not merely by giving his compositions evocative titles—his catalogue includes “Earth and the Great Weather,” “In the White Silence,” “Strange and Sacred Noise,” “Dark Waves”—but by literally anchoring the work in the landscapes that have inspired it.

“My music is going inexorably from being about place to becoming place,” Adams said of his installation. “I have a vivid memory of flying out of Alaska early one morning on my way to Oberlin, where I taught for a couple of fall semesters. It was a glorious early-fall day. Winter was coming in. I love winter, and I didn’t want to go. As we crested the central peaks of the Alaska Range, I looked down at Mt. Hayes, and all at once I was overcome by the intense love that I have for this place—an almost erotic feeling about those mountains. Over the next fifteen minutes, I found myself furiously sketching, and when I came up for air I realized, There it is. I knew that I wanted to hear the unheard, that I wanted to somehow transpose the music that is just beyond the reach of our ears into audible vibrations. I knew that it had to be its own space. And I knew that it had to be real—that I couldn’t fake this, that nothing could be recorded. It had to have the ring of truth.

“Actually, my original conception for ‘The Place’ was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea—tuning the whole world—stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth.”

Adams blends in well with the proudly scruffy characters who populate the diners and bars of Fairbanks. Tall and rail-thin, his handsomely weathered face framed by a short beard, he bears a certain resemblance to Clint Eastwood, and speaks in a similarly soft, husky voice. He’s not unworldly—he travels frequently to New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and other cultural capitals—but he is happiest when he goes on extended camping trips into the wilderness, especially to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He exudes a regular-guy coolness that is somewhat unusual in contemporary composers.

He lives on a hill outside Fairbanks, in a sparsely furnished, light-filled split-level house, much of which he designed and built himself. He shares it with his second wife, Cynthia Adams, who has been the mainstay of his occasionally precarious existence since the late nineteen-seventies. Cindy, as spirited as her husband is soft-spoken, runs GrantStation, an Internet business that advises nonprofit organizations across the country. To many locals, the Adamses are best known for serving on the board of the Alaska Goldpanners, Fairbanks’s amateur baseball team. When they go shopping at Fred Meyer, the all-purpose store in town, they are peppered with questions about the state of the team.

Like many Alaskans, Adams migrated to the state from a very different world. He was born in Meridian, Mississippi; his father worked for A. T. & T., first as an accountant and later in upper management, and the family moved often when he was a child. Much of his adolescence was spent in Millburn, New Jersey, where he developed a passion for rock and roll. He was the drummer in several bands, one of which, Pocket Fuzz, had the honor of opening for the Beach Boys in a local New Jersey show.

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Frank Zappa caused a violent change of perspective. In the liner notes to Zappa’s 1966 album “Freak Out!,” Adams noticed a quotation: “ ‘The present-day composer refuses to die!’—Edgard Varèse.” Adams went hunting for information about this mystery figure, whose name he pronounced “Var-EE-zee.” A friend, the composer Richard Einhorn, discovered a Varèse disk in a Greenwich Village record shop, and the two braved the sonic hailstorms of “Poème Électronique.” Adams was soon devouring the music of the postwar European and American avant-garde: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, and, most important, John Cage.

“Once I discovered that stuff, I rapidly lost interest in the backbeat and the three chords,” Adams said. “I was still in bands, but they kept getting weirder and weirder. In the last band, a trio called Sloth, we were trying to work with open-form scores and graphic notation.”

In 1969, the family moved again, to Macon, Georgia. Adams enrolled in Westminster Academy, an élite boarding school, from which he failed to graduate. “I was your classic problem kid,” he said. “My grades were O.K.; it was my behavior that was the problem.” At the age of sixteen, he fell in love with a young woman named Margrit von Braun—the younger daughter of Wernher von Braun, the godfather of the American space program. Not surprisingly, the German émigré and the American teen-ager didn’t get along. In 1969, Adams says, he was impressed more by the Miracle Mets than by the first moon landing. Nonetheless, he and Margrit married, and for several years he coexisted uneasily with her powerful father.

In 1971, Adams moved to Los Angeles to study music at CalArts. One teacher there, the composer James Tenney, became a significant mentor, his wild imagination balanced by the mathematical rigor of his methods. Likewise, beneath the dreamlike surfaces of Adams’s work are mathematical schemes controlling the interrelationship of rhythms and the unfolding of melodic patterns. At CalArts, the novice composer also familiarized himself with the oddball heroes of the American avant-garde: Harry Partch, who adopted a hobo life style during the Great Depression; Conlon Nancarrow, who spent the better part of his career writing pieces for player piano in Mexico City; and Lou Harrison, who sought musical truth in the Balinese gamelan tradition. Adams calls them “composers who burned down the house and started over.”

Perhaps Adams’s most crucial encounter was with Morton Feldman, the loquacious New Yorker whose music has an otherworldly quietude and breadth. On a Columbia LP he heard Feldman’s “Piece for Four Pianos,” in which four pianists play through the same music at different rates, floating around each other like the arms of a Calder mobile. That work galvanized Adams, teaching him that music could break free of European tradition while retaining a sensuous allure. One of his first characteristic pieces, for three percussion players, bears the Feldmanesque title “Always Very Soft,” although the seamlessness of the construction—accelerating and decelerating patterns overlap to create a single, ever-evolving sonority—hints at a distinct sensibility.