Cacophony and the Beyond: An Aural Topography

“A new world can’t look like what we’ve seen; it can’t sound like what we’ve heard, and it can’t feel like what we’ve felt before.”
—Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste¹

First, there was birdsong. It had always been this loud, this constant, perhaps, but in the newly shuttered city, the trills and chirps of sparrows, blue jays, starlings, cardinals, and others were surreally amplified, and could be heard long after the sun went down. Do birds always sing in the middle of the night, or did the fresh and brief hush of the city confuse their sense of time? Nighttime in those earliest days of the pandemic in New York City was impossibly quiet—no horns blaring, no chatter from stoop barbecues, no refrains streaming out of car windows—save for the birds, who activated the darkness with their call and response.²

In the early ’80s, sound artist Max Neuhaus proposed a project focusing on the sirens of ambulances, police cars, and fire engines. He wanted to replace their standard sonic patterns (divided into the “wail,” Although his concerns were primarily practical—to clarify an emergency vehicle’s position in space—he was also deeply invested in rendering the city soundscape more tolerable, that is, more aesthetically pleasing.