The New York Public Library

Missing Sounds of New York

“Missing Sounds of New York” is an album that brought the city sounds New Yorkers missed back to them under quarantine, from a place you wouldn’t think would miss the noise: The New York Public Library.

Cars honking, aggressive bike messengers whizzing by, millennials’ self-absorbed conversations, subway cars screeching, even that guy who yells at you for looking in his general direction: this is a love letter from one of the city’s oldest institutions to the cacophony that only its citizens could miss.

The album was brought to life in just three weeks under quarantine.

Every track built from scratch, utilizing a mix of archival sounds and crowdsourcing—it was a project made remotely and entirely from memory.

Over 100 New Yorkers and 10 different languages are featured on the album, meticulously layered together with sound effects and ambient noise to recreate details only the city’s inhabitants could recognize.

The album earned a crazy amount of organic press, with 300,000 streams in the first week—and listeners in every country. The Daily Show parodied it, the New York Times built a bittersweet interactive article around it, and the album’s very own Wikipedia page appeared overnight.

The New York Times wrote an interactive article pairing pre-quarantine photos from their archive with our album.

They put us in print, too. So did the New Yorker. (All of which was huge for us, as… well, New Yorkers.)