Sounds and the City
I recently moved, which is interesting to me only. Some people are surprised that I moved to a downtown of a city whose downtown is not very thriving (yet...I have the superpower of jump starting gentrification). Aside from just living in a different place where I can get some distance between my home and the place I work, I moved for the downtown noise. Yes, I cannot stand silence in my living situation. I need the sounds of industry, labor, development, economic exploitation, pollution. The more distinct the better. But I’m not a masochist. After about 9pm I don’t want any sudden, irregular sounds, just the reassuring hum of the freeway or the general sounds of passing revelers. So far I’ve been lucky--
I just moved out of a very small town on a very uneventful street, except for the train tracks literally right outside my house. The train that comes by just about once every 76 minutes. It’s not the train on tracks, it’s the horn that I believe the engineer is required to blast as they go through town. The first night I cried, but it’s somehow comforting. I like to think how hard they go on it. It also reminds me of Mister Toad’s Wild Ride, the children’s ride in which you have a head on collision with a train and go to hell. I adjusted to sleep through it, but the times it woke me up at night, it was a brief respite from a nightmare or a reminder that I needed to go to the bathroom.
In the early aughts, I loved in a high rise in NW DV off of 16th Street, across from Malcolm X Park. The street was a major throughway to the veterans hospital. These sirens weren’t your typical sirens, they were blaring and ominous. My comfort was morbid. It made me think of who was in that ambulance, if they knew they were almost at a place of help. I had a cat that sat at the window, aching to see the flashing lights. He was also morbid. I miss him.
In graduate school at NYU I lived on the 24th floor of a high rise in Murray Hill. My windows were thick and did not open. However, the only sound that pierced them was the garbage trucks who emptied the dumpster directly below. At 6am daily. I felt really cheated out of the Manhattan noise experience.
Currently, I overlook a stadium for a minor league ball team. It’s exactly the ambient sounds you want, which sort of sounds like stock footage from 50s movies. Cracking bats, roar of the crowd, an announcer saying things excitedly and the chorus of "Day-O" on repeat. (Have they not heard of Jock Jams?) I want to hate it but there is something powerful standing at my window starting out at hundreds of people like I’m looking over the Tron Arena. I’m still paranoid they can see into my apartment after dark.