Motion Slickness : In the end, an exhibition that moves and makes noise at Santa Ana College signifies next to nothing.

The trouble with kinetic art--the kind that moves--is that the people who make it often mistake gadgetry for allusive imagery and simplistic moralizing for resonant themes.

That’s only one problem that plagues “Sound: A Noise, Vocal Utterance, Musical Tone or the Like,” a group show of pieces with audible moving parts at the Santa Ana College Fine Arts Gallery. Though all the activity and viewer-initiated interactivity turns the small gallery into a mini theme park, the sound and fury signify next to nothing.

Considering the wide array of contemporary work that involves a sound component (audible or imagined), the selections by curators Caroline McCabe and Karen Brown are vastly disappointing. But maybe it isn’t surprising that a show whose handout text begins, “Like a toddler in church, the objects in this exhibit move and make noise,” would not be particularly subtle or sophisticated.

Too little attention was paid to the quality of the sounds and the ways they would interact. Silly, noisy pieces such as Melanie Klein’s “Beat” (a spring-mounted rubber salamander that bangs against a glass-walled drum) drown out their softer neighbors.

While Susan Hornbeak-Ortiz has made much more fully realized works than the three in this show (her “Harp,” a winged harp that produces eerie music, would have been truly apropos), their mysterious, anthropomorphic qualities require a subdued environment. The noise in the gallery overwhelms “Resentment Builds,” in which the faint knocks and bumps--and a hissed “Shut up!”--issue from within the drawers of a bureau with side-mounted interrogation lights.

Even if Nancy Mooslin’s “Woman Reaching for the Moon” somehow represents a visual transcription of Steven Stucky’s “Pinturas de Tamayo,” these sculpture doodles are as blandly vacuous as “Musical Gateway,” the piece she co-designed two years ago for the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim. But Stucky’s piece, a tone poem vaguely reminiscent of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” is practically inaudible.

Other objects, such as Andy Schuessler’s tilting picture frame (“It’s on the Left, Right?”) and Michael Oliveri’s untitled earphone muffs and “Don’t Touch” bicycle wheel piece, are sophomoric shticks masquerading as conceptual art.

Klein, represented by several heavy-handed pieces, comes off best in “Flying Fish,” a ceiling-suspended construction of odds and ends (including a rusted helmet and a tail-like fragment of tire) that comes alive every half-hour with a series of flailing trembles and jerks that don’t demand a pop psych interpretation.

Droll humor deriving from formal means--the humble humanism of a hat-maker’s wooden form and a mechanism recalling an old-fashioned toy--gives Leland Means’ “The Lesson” its mild charm. The curved block of wood inclines toward a mechanized paddle that repeatedly administers a heavy whomp.

Ironically, technical problems afflict a piece by Mineko Grimmer, known for her meditative, utterly low-tech sculptures involving pebbles frozen in a block of ice suspended over strips of bamboo stretched across a wooden container. The melting ice releases the pebbles, which clatter intermittently onto the bamboo, producing a kind of aleatory music.

But the ice already had melted on a recent afternoon, effectively eradicating the music and the imagery of the piece.

* “Sound: A Noise, Vocal Utterance, Musical Tone or the Like” continues through March 19 at the Santa Ana College Fine Arts Gallery, 1530 W. 17th St., Santa Ana. Monday and Thursday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. and 6:30-8:30 p.m. Free. (714) 564-5615.