You’d never know, from walking around this quiet, residential neighborhood in Pittsburgh, that inside one of the houses is a (taxidermized) bear. Or a full-sized lighthouse. Or a secret passage through a fireplace.

Outside, there’s vinyl siding. But the insides of the four Troy Hill Art Houses are art installations that yank visitors into four very different worlds.

The latest, “Mrs. Christopher’s House,” which opened this fall, is from conceptual artist Mark Dion, whose work has been shown at the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He’s best known for thinking about how we collect and display objects, what it says about us and how we think about the past.

Conceptual artist Mark Dion lives in upstate New York.

Jorge Colombo

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Dion created “Mrs. Christopher’s House” to be a time machine, he said. And indeed, inside, visitors explore several different period rooms: there’s the medieval door that hides the taxidermized bear, sleeping in a bed of straw, its chain broken; a re-creation of a 1960s living room decorated for Christmas; and an art gallery from the 1990s with piles of mail on the desk and photographs of taxidermized polar bears on display in natural history museums around the world.

Then there is the “Extinction Club.” The wallpaper is all drawings of extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. And in the corner, there’s a cage with a door open — and a dead canary at the bottom.

“It’s very much making reference to the tradition of the of the miners canary,” Dion said. “And, you know, something’s gone terribly wrong when the bird stops to sing.”

The “Extinction Club” looks like a gentlemen’s club from the 1920s — but the walls are covered with images of extinct animals like dodos and Tasmanian tigers.

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A visit to Japan

Dion and three other artists were commissioned to create whole-house works of art for the Troy Hill Art Houses by collector Evan Mirapaul. In 2007, Mirapaul visited Naoshima, an island on the coast of Japan that has transformed seven of its abandoned houses into “art houses.”

“I don’t think I’d seen anywhere else where an artist was able to engage with an entire building, and have the entire building be the work,” Mirapaul said.

Also, he said, he liked that the art houses were in a residential neighborhood. “You’d walk down a little lane and you’d see, you know, Mrs. Nakashima working in her garden. And then next door would be the James Terrell house. It just kind of coexisted in a way that I thought was both satisfying and important.”

When he moved to Pittsburgh from New York, “I stole the idea wholesale . . . and started inviting people,” he said. “And here we are.”

A working lighthouse

Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis stand next to the base of their working lighthouse, built within a Pittsburgh row house.

Jennifer Vanasco

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The houses are intended to be permanent installations, instead of temporary gallery exhibits. That was one of the reasons that artists Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis chose to build a full-sized, working lighthouse inside the Pittsburgh house they were given, which they call “Darkhouse Lighthouse.”

“I come from Cornwall, where there where a lighthouse is a very familiar part of the architecture,” said Clayton.

Lewis added that they wanted to make something that could serve a function in the future. “So we had this idea that in like 300, 500 — or five years from now, when the ocean rises, this lighthouse could sort of be unveiled, sort of like a time capsule.”

The ocean could wash up to the lighthouse’s doorstep, the light could be activated, and it “could be a beacon,” Clayton said.

Visiting the Troy Hill Houses

The outside of artist Robert Kuśmirowski’s “Kunzhaus” looks ordinary…except for the graveyard he installed in the back.

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All four houses — “Mrs. Christopher’s House,” “Darkhouse Lighthouse,” Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski’s “Kunzhaus” and German artist Thorsten Brinkmann’s “La Hütte Royal” (that’s the one with the secret passage) are open to the public for free by appointment. Curators guide visitors through the houses.

Tours take about one hour each, but Mirapaul said they are meant to be viewed again and again.

“People ask me, how do I choose the different artists for the pieces? I don’t have any strict criteria,” Mirapaul said. “But the one of the things that’s very important to me is that an artist can create a work that is layered and complex enough to reward multiple visits.”

People come back “two, three, five, eight times,” he said. “And that thrills me.”

Mark Dion’s diorama imagining what Christmas 1961 may have looked like in “Mrs. Christopher’s House” — back when it actually belonged to Mrs. Christopher.

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Edited for air and digital by Ciera Crawford. Broadcast story mixed by Chloee Weiner.

A new music streaming app has entered the market.

It’s called Nintendo Music — and on it, you can listen to dozens of hours of music from games like Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong.

The app has had more than a million downloads since it launched on Oct. 30.

The early success, and the enthusiasm it’s received from fans, speaks to the unique history and appeal of Nintendo’s music.

Nintendo: a melodic history

Ben Kidd analyzes video game music on his YouTube channel, 8-bit Music Theory, with videos like “Why Animal Crossing Music Sounds Nostalgic” and “Why Does Mario Music Sound ‘Fun’?”

Kidd says the popularity of his videos speaks to how much people care about video game music. But he says there’s also a number of things about Nintendo music specifically that resonates with people.

“I think the strength of Nintendo’s music really has to do with the strength of their early composers,” he says.

Composers like Koji Kondo, who helped pioneer video game music and crafted the ear-worming melodies you find in games like Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda.

Over the years, these same melodies have been remixed and re-interpreted across new games, creating a sense of nostalgia for players.

“It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation,” Kidd says. “The melodies are so strong, that they’re easy to reuse, and very effective to reuse. And the more you reuse them across games, the stronger they get.”

Kidd also says that throughout the years, Nintendo has positioned its new, young composers to work alongside veterans of the industry. He points to composer Toru Minegishi, who contributed tracks to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask alongside Koji Kondo in 2000, and then served as lead composer for The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess in 2006.

The broad appeal of video game music

The Nintendo Music app owes its early success to more than just Nintendo music itself.

For years, people have been listening to video game music on other platforms, like YouTube. Playlists are all over the site, often organized around different tasks or feelings, like sleeping or studying.

“Video game music is often designed to fill a background space without taking too much of the listener’s attention away,” says Harvey Jones, a musician who makes music inspired by video games under the moniker Pizza Hotline.

Jones is also part of the community on YouTube that shares and archives video game music.

“Around 2022, I began digging deep into ’90s and naughties video game soundtracks from consoles like the N64, the GameCube, the PS1 and the Dreamcast, and I found so many hidden bangers,” he says.

Video game playlists like this can garner millions of views. Jones says he sees Nintendo responding to this kind of demand.

“They’ve legitimized the video game music listening experience with this app,” he says.

Still, the app has garnered some criticisms. Kidd says one is that composers are not credited.

“It would be nicer for them, I think, if people associated these soundtracks they love with the people who wrote them, rather than just the company they work for,” he says.

It’s the kind of information that he argues would also be useful for users of the app. In the same way a jazz fan might recognize the stylistic differences between John Coltrane or Hank Mobley, Kidd argues close listeners could draw their own observations about various Nintendo composers.

NPR reached out to Nintendo for comment about whether this feature would make its way onto the app, and has not yet received a response.

The company has already added additional music to the app since its launch, including songs from the Donkey Kong Country 2 soundtrack.