As I write this New York City has entered Phase 1 of reopening from the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, meaning some of the area’s so-called normal activity will slowly start to resume. Personally, I haven’t been on the subway since mid-March, and I don’t miss it one bit. Taking cabs, sitting on my stoop, attending baseball games, or hitting crowded bars on a weekend night are not generally part of my lifestyle. So I’m probably not the intended audient for Missing Sounds Of New York City, a streaming album released by the New York Public Library, and found on Spotify or on the NYPL’s own website. Released on 1 May, at the height of quarantine in the city, it was assembled quickly and designed to address nostalgia for pre-Covid New York life by evoking the everyday sounds eliminated from it as the pandemic took hold in late March and April. There are eight tracks, sound collages lasting around two minutes each, that provide a series of aural snapshots. On the opening track “To See An Underground Show”, you hear subway trains entering and leaving the station, and then go inside the car as kids do a breakdance show between stops; “Romancing Rush Hour” conjures the workday commute’s mélange of hailing a taxi, pedestrian traffic, jackhammers, a busking saxophonist, and laughter; “Serenity Of A Rowdy City Park” pulls together the sounds of a horse drawn carriage, dogs barking, birds flying off, a bicycle bell, overhead planes, a basketball game and a rowboat in a lake; “Out In Left Field” is a miniaturisation of a baseball game, with the national anthem, applause, heckling from the peanut gallery, the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd; “For The Love Of Noisy Neighbours” simulates the doorstep promenade of passing conversations, a car blasting music, skateboards and a parade; “I’d Call A Cab To Anywhere” follows a cab ride uptown, with the driver playing the radio, traffic sounds and an irate fellow motorist; “IDs please”, clinking glasses and pouring liquid tag the location of “Never Call It A Night Again” as a bar; and finally “The Not Quite Quiet Library” is recorded in the famous main branch of the NYPL itself on 42nd St, with its iconic twin lion sculptures out front.

Put together by the NYPL’s public relations department and a creative agency called Mother New York, the tracks are composites drawn from the agency’s sound library, YouTube videos and other disparately sourced material, all recorded long before the pandemic. Some of the spoken bits were staged using friends of the compilers. Missing Sounds’ tracks are too short and impersonal to invite comparison with longform urban sound pieces like Hildegard Westerkamp’s A Walk Through The City (1981), which made a more focused examination of the soundscape of Vancouver’s skid row, or more recently Emeka Ogboh’s Lagos Soundscapes installations from 2008 on, which captured sounds of Lagos that in some cases are rapidly disappearing as the city itself evolves; Walter Ruttmann’s classic city symphony Weekend, made for German radio in 1930, which offered a rapid-fire rhythmic juxtaposition of all kinds of city sounds and was rediscovered and embraced by DJ culture in the 90s as an archetypal sound montage, could be cited as an ancestor. But what Missing Sounds most reminded me of was Tony Schwartz’s recordings of New York in the 50s for Folkways, specifically a 10" LP called Sounds Of My City (1959), also originally made for radio, which he recorded entirely in his midtown neighbourhood. Schwartz announces and then plays back sounds of a thunderstorm, birds, dogs, church bells, a boat in the Hudson River, street sounds, footsteps, traffic, jackhammers, sirens, car horns, Port Authority announcements and the subway – all in all not too different from what you would hear four decades later. The sounds that date it are clackety subway turnstiles and people hawking their wares: a Time Square newspaper barker, a flower girl in Union Square, a Harlem shoeshine kid and Orchard Street shop barkers. On the record’s final cut “Sounds Outside My House”, Schwartz gently narrates a typical day in the life, again providing audio snippets to illustrate. It’s a bit like Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien meets American kids’ TV show Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood:

First there is silence

At 6am Mrs Klein hangs out her wash

At 7 o’clock the birds arrive

At 7:30 they collect the garbage

Monday at 8 the streets are repaired

Thursday construction begins in a housing project on Columbus Circle, three blocks away

On Saturday there is an air raid drill

And on Sunday there are church bells

On holidays there are parades

And after school there are football games in the street

A street gospel group invites you to a service

And then there is rain.

At sundown a lone musician walks the white line in the middle of 57th St

Any evening in election time there are politicians in their sound trucks

And every night at 3am there are cats (screeching)

The city of NY is made up of millions of people and perpetual sound…

The track’s quaintness and Schwartz’s obvious affection for his surroundings echo in Missing Sounds, especially its track titles, but both ultimately just string together the sonic attributes common to nearly every metropolis. A more authentic aural document of contemporary New York street life is Christopher DeLaurenti’s Adrift In New York (2002), a fairly gritty eight minute piece that records street hustles, overlapping conversations, catcalls, and construction workers on strike. And frankly, while I probably appreciate the quotidian cacophony of the city more than some, I enjoyed the new, quieter environment that the lockdown opened up. During the pandemic, the drastic reduction in noise from traffic and street life changed the NYC soundscape dramatically; what has been especially noticeable is an increase in birdsong, often birds not seen or heard in the region. The noise level in the early weeks of the pandemic decreased considerably – I measured it myself in my apartment, which usually has a reading of 40 dB on the average calm afternoon, and dropped to 30–32 dB, a significant decrease. It was a lot like the city during a blizzard, without the snow.

Of course, by the end of May the soundscape had shifted again, as the protests over the murder of George Floyd gathered speed and a curfew of first 11pm and then 8pm was imposed. During the day chanting and large groups of people venturing out of lockdown en masse could be heard, then at night, total silence (at least where I live; protests and some violence continued well into the night in different districts). On Tuesday 2 June I attended a silent vigil at McCarren Park in Brooklyn. For half an hour the crowd stood, kneeled, or sat in complete silence, finally erupting in applause, and doing call and response with the organisers. In a way it condensed and reversed the curfew’s 24 hour daily cycle of crowd noise and silence, and also recalled Yves Klein’s Monotone Symphony (or Symphony Of Monotone-Silence) (1949–61) in which 20 minutes of a single sustained tone is followed by 20 minutes of silence. It was an incredible experience to be in my local park and have it be completely hushed, especially with a gathering that size (a few hundred people), and the understanding that sounds would be excluded allowed for concentration on the crowd’s shared beliefs as articulated through our shared attendance, rather than by vocalising them or even holding a sign. Especially after all the angy debate online that same day (which was #blackouttuesday) over muting or silencing oneself by posting black squares to your social media account instead of using your voice to protest and/or spread information to your feed via images, I realised that being there, in person, with my neighbours, not my online followers, in the real world, not the virtual world, is speaking up, even if you don’t say a word; and in doing so your voice acquires a resonance that is not possible on a social media platform, which after all is a network and not a community. Physical presence can often speak louder than words; and like sound (but not sight) its perceptibility has a 360 degree range.

Covid-19 and adapting to its reality have been an unprecedented experience for every person on the planet and naturally engendered numerous other new experiences. For all the mass protests in living memory, no other has ever emerged during a pandemic lockdown where all other collective activities and the regular work week had been (mostly) suspended. The sound of protest in New York this spring is a new one, not an old one that’s missing. And to reiterate, what I’m talking about is not necessarily, or at least not entirely, audible; the sound is a communal entity, just as the sound of a room at a concert is not only the acoustics of the space, but the togetherness of the audience. You cannot stream that kind of sound online; you have to go out, bring it into existence through participation and make it a part of your life.