New York City Roars

There’s a constant roar in New York City. I step out on the balcony at 5:30 in the morning, and it’s there. Walking in the evening in Tudor City, or Riverside Park, or up high on Central Park West, or deep in the West Village—wherever I go, it’s there. It’s a machine-sound, not specifically traffic, or any one isolated sound, but an overall and underall roar, like a huge fan that never stops.

On top of it are layered the distinct, easily named sounds:
• the deep rumble, clatter, and bang of the dump trucks from hell as they bounce over metal plates in the road
• sirens
• horns
• traffic
• helicopters taking off or landing
• loud, inescapable cell phone conversations
• scaffolding being put up or torn down
• buses pulling to a stop and accelerating away, doors opening and closing, wheelchair lifts descending and ascending
• young people who’ve been drinking, laughing and talking loudly on the streets
• homeless men belching and yelling curses at strangers
• parents calling out to their young children as they bolt down the sidewalk
• couples talking, flirting, arguing, deciding where to go, what to do
• dogs scuffling and their people pulling them back with sharp “no’s” and yanks
• even the occasional bird peeping, tweeting, cawing

Then come the lulls, which are never, ever silent, but are filled with the roar of a river of sound that never sleeps.

The only places I’ve ever heard silence in New York City are indoors: wealthy homes with sound-deadening windows, churches with thick stone walls, apartments with back rooms facing other back rooms—these are actually rarely silent because of construction, people blowing horns, kids playing outdoors, and so on, but every now and then, all of this activity ceases at the same time, and there is a moment of blissful silence.

In his book This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J. Levitin explains that pitch is directly mapped onto the brain: “If I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precisely that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440 Hz—for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain!” (p. 29).

I wonder what living in the constant roar of New York City is doing to my brain.

When I went to the mountains of Colorado this summer, there was no constant roar, just the occasional car passing by below the hill and lots of birds and bugs making their calls and cheeps and creaks. I heard the silence, but I also heard a constant internal roar in my ears. Now that I’m back, I notice the roar in my ears is there all the time, and I wonder if it was always this way, or if it’s only been this way since I’ve lived in the city, and if so, when did it start? And if this is the case for me, what is the case for others? What do others hear?