Spotify playlist brings New York noise to a world silenced by coronavirus

“Doesn’t it always seem that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone?” Joni Mitchell’s classic song Big yellow taxi could be a hymn to our strange, excited times. So many of the small everyday interactions that we take for granted – hugs, handshakes, crowded trains, a morning conversation at a colleague’s desk – are currently out of our reach.

With this nostalgia and longing in mind, the New York Public Library has put together an impressive playlist called Missing Sounds of New York to convey the typical sounds of the city to the socially distant masses who yearn for the familiar hustle and bustle of the city.

The eight tracks, each between one and three minutes, use a combination of audio to create familiar ambient sounds that tell little stories from everyday life in the now incredibly quiet metropolis.

There is the horn, the roar and the subway musicians during rush hour; cheering fans at a baseball game; noisy neighbors; A passenger gets in a taxi, closes the door and tells the driver where to go: “110th and Third Ave., please.”

There’s even a record of life in the New York Public Library. Listen carefully and you can hear a guide with a strong New York accent giving a tour, a visitor asking a librarian for help, and a reader telling the story of the toddlers.

“This album is a different and creative way we can help,” says the library. “It provides an entertaining distraction that gives New Yorkers access to something that we all lack: many of the city’s typical sounds that we know and love.”

The library created the playlist with the creative agency Mother New York. It is publicly available for streaming Spotify and 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 indicate that it will be received as one.

“It gives me such comfort during the quarantine,” wrote one listener. Another wrote: “I close my eyes and I’m there.”

Ironically, whether you’re a New Yorker or not, the city’s cacophony is a soothing balm for the worldwide sounds of silence.

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