Most people simply look at the Eiffel Tower. China Blue Wong listens to it.

You can, too.

Wong, an adjunct professor in Brown’s art department and a fellow in its psychology department, recently returned from Paris. There, she made recordings on and around the soaring steel structure: people visiting it, elevators traversing it and cars passing it.

China Blue Wong

However, Wong also recorded the sound of the structure itself. This, she says, no one has heard before. That’s because no one can — not without special equipment, which, of course, Wong used.

The goal is art. The means is science.

Sometime in the next few months, Wong says she’d like to take her tower recordings and turn them into installation art, what she calls a “sound sculpture,” a room surrounded with speakers giving visitors an audio sense of place, namely the Eiffel Tower.

“There’s an interesting balance between the human experience and the actual structural integrity that coalesces in the acoustic arena.”

While Wong’s installation is months away, the contributing elements for her art are available now for all to hear, and see: www.chinablueart.com/eiffeltower.htm.

The site shows pictures of the four places on the tower where Wong recorded: the basement machine room for the elevators; the ground level in front of a restaurant; and two observation landings, one half-way up and the other at the top. At each site, Wong recorded for 17 minutes. She used binaural microphones, one on each side of her head, which register the direction of ambient noise.

“What’s recorded is from your vantage point. It makes it very personal.”

And Wong used seismic microphones, normally used by geologists to measure tremors in the earth, to record vibrations in the tower, which is made of 18,038 pieces of steel and more than 2.5 million rivets.

“Those are all opportunities for vibration. As soon as you get a hole with a rivet through it, that’s an opportunity to play, movement.”

The wind, the people, the elevators all contribute to the tower’s changing vibrational noise. At times it sounds vaguely like an underwater recording of a whale, or, better yet, the foreboding background mood music in some suspense movie, a little eerie and haunting.

Wong wants to use both sets of recordings, the binaural and the seismic, to create her art.

“It would mimic the experience a visitor would have and also provide something different that a visitor wouldn’t experience.”

In late September, Wong and her husband, Seth Horowitz, an assistant professor of psychology at Brown, along with five others, went on a recording expedition of the Eiffel Tower. It was, according to Wong, the first time vibrational readings were taken of the tower.

“Sometimes, you just have to ask.”

The tower officials gave Wong permission to attach her seismic microphone on various sites of the tower, including the basement, where the public is not permitted.

Among the ambient sounds you’ll hear are the distant horns of cars caught in traffic, the basement alarm blaring from a rare malfunction of the tower’s elevators, and a typical remark of a tourist arriving at the top of the tower: “Holy crumb!”

Wong has previously created audio art works connected to specific places. In 2006 in one work, “The Calls,” she compiled telephone messages and airtraffic controller recordings made during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And last year in another work, “Negative Eclipse,” she made vibrational recordings of an indoor 13-foot steel sculpture created by Richard Serra. That sculpture, however, was made of one piece of metal, which yielded mild vibrational sounds compared to the Eiffel Tower.

“It’s a completely different situation. You have tons of pieces and bolts and people walking through it and elevators going up it. You have all these different energies playing on the surface.”

Someone might say that the particular steel structure may not matter, and that seismic recordings could be taken of such things as a steel bridge or high-tension tower. But those things, Wong says, “don’t have social value. The Eiffel Tower has a history to it.”

The tower, designed by Gustave Eiffel, was built in 1889 and was the world’s tallest structure at the time, 1,063 feet. It was built as part of a World’s Fair and was meant to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. It was not intended to be permanent. But its popularity, with more than six million visitors annually, has made it so.

“It’s a spectacular structure. For me, there are personal reasons.”

Wong, who has an Eiffel Tower doormat, wine rack and salt-and-pepper shakers at her Warwick home, visited the tower for the first time in December 2005. While standing on the viewing stand at its top, she became engaged.

About a year later, Wong was thinking of audio art projects she could pursue.

“It started out, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if . . .’ ”

Wong has not yet taken her scientific recordings and turned them into art, and can’t say what mood or message her art may convey.

“The content of the art would create its own story. It doesn’t have to lean on the story of the tower. It will be its own experience.”

brourke@projo.com