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It’s not the kind of bustling scene seen in New York City right now.
Caitlin Petrakovitz / CNET
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“Doesn’t it always seem like you don’t know what you have until he leaves?” Joni Mitchell’s classic song, Big Yellow Taxi, could be a hymn to our weird reversed times. Many of the little everyday interactions we take for granted (hugs, handshakes, crowded trains, a morning chat at a coworker’s desk) remain out of our reach at this time.
With this nostalgia and longing in mind, the New York Public Library compiled an immersive playlist, called the Missing Sounds of New York, to bring the quintessential sounds of the city to the masses of social estrangement who might be longing for the urban hustle and bustle family.
New York Public Library
The eight tracks, one to three minutes each, use an audio mix to create familiar and ambient soundscapes that tell little stories of everyday life in the now eerily silent metropolis.
There are the honks, the screams, and the rush hour subway musicians; cheering for fans at a baseball game; noisy neighbors; a passenger who climbs into a cabin, closes the door and tells the driver where to go: “110th and Third Ave. please.”
There’s even a recording of the life of the New York Public Library. Listen carefully, and you can hear a guide with a strong New York accent taking a tour, a visitor asking for help from a librarian, and a time-book reader for young children.
“This album is a different and creative way we can help,” says the library, “by providing an entertaining distraction that allows New Yorkers to access something we are all missing: many of the quintessential sounds of the city we know and we love”.
The library created the playlist with creative agency Mother New York. It is publicly available to stream on Spotify and on the New York Public Library website.
The library calls Missing Sounds of New York an auditory love letter to the city, and comments on its website suggest it is being received as such.
“This gives me so much comfort during quarantine,” wrote one listener. Another wrote, “I close my eyes and I’m there.”
Whether you are a New Yorker or not, the cacophony of the city is, ironically, a soothing balm for the sounds of silence around the world.
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