THE SONOCENE

INTRO

Listening can be many things. It is an exchange of vibrational energy in the form of waves. It is a means for auditory perception and cognition. It is a relational endeavor between a listener and a sound-source. In this episode, “INTRO,” you will be guided through a deep-listening exercise. The soundscape of a rainy day in Manhattan is explored through the concepts of listening, sound, and the Anthropocene.

Episode Transcript

[A New York City soundscape fades into your foreground. The spring rain patters against your umbrella. Cars, some northbound others soundbound, splash puddles across the warm asphalt. People mutter quiet conversations as they hurry along the sidewalk. Weather, technology, and people all resonate together.]

[00:34] It's April 2023. And it's raining in Manhattan.

[Sirens wail in the distance as rain continues to patter, cars continue to splash, and people continue to mutter.]

[01:04] You're standing on the corner of Park Avenue and East 95th Street. What do you hear?

[The sirens also continue at a consistent volume as if the vehicles have reached their destination. The alarm glissandos—its pitch rising and falling, rising and falling—and begins to blend with the rainy soundscape of the city. Several car horns resound with abrupt, “honks!”]

[01:53] You might notice the sound of the rain against your umbrella.

[Amidst the multi-textured soundscape, the sound of the rain against your umbrella fades into your foreground.]

[02:21] The sounds of cars along the street.

[The sounds of rain begin to decrescendo, as the sounds of cars alongs the street now fade into your foreground.]

[02:52] The muffled conversations of passersby.

[The sounds of the rain and cars are still discernible, but the quieted mumblings of people around you begin to enter your foreground.]

[3:21] While each of these sounds represents a specific thing or event or environment. They all share something in common. The fact that they're all vibrational energy—energy that travels from a source through the medium of air to your ears;

[The soundscape slowly pans from your left ear to your right ear, to finally balance equally between both ears (as if the soundscape has traveled through the medium of air to your ears).]

where it reverberates against your eardrums, causing the tiny hair like cells within your inner ear to transduce soundwaves into electric signals…

[Tinkly, electronic sounds oscillate between your ears.]

…and then send those signals to your brain.

[The tinkly sounds raise in pitch as they travel along your central nervous system. They fade into silence as the rainy soundscape once again enters your foreground.]

[4:13] Listening is, therefore, a process. An exchange of energy. A means for perception and cognition. And yet, it's hard to define listening in those universal terms. Humans are not the only beings who listen. And the act of listening differs based on context and individual disposition. Put another way, your listening is always filtered through your own specific physiology, experience and understanding.

[A car’s tires grind against wet asphalt. Indiscernible voices and music thrum in the background. Raindrops thump against umbrella and ground alike. But is this how everyone “hears” these sounds or just you?]

[5:11] You can think of this as a relational endeavor. Between you as a listener and the world around you. And although listening can connect you to the rain against your umbrella,

[Raindrops thud against your umbrella.]

the cars along the street,

[The slimy, wet peel of rubber against the street sounds out.]

and the people walking nearby.

[A diversity of accents and phrases blend together in collective, jumbled dialogue.]

Listening also reminds you that you are not completely separate from them. Your heartbeat.

[The muted “thump, thump” of a steady heartbeat begins.]

Your flow of blood.

[Bubbly undulations of flowing liquid commence.]

Your breathing.

[The raspy intake of oxygen into your lungs, followed by your swift exhalation of CO2, joins the bodily-sonic-texture of your heartbeat and flowing blood.]

Your life is intimately part of that world, enmeshed in a reciprocal relationship with people, transportation, weather, animals, atmosphere, water.

[The sounds of people chatting, cars passing, and rainfall; together with your heartbeat, blood flow, and respiration; alongside the howl of coyotes, yelps of rats, drone of wind, crash of ocean waves, together begin to blend as a dense and multi-layered soundscape. It becomes difficult to discern one sound from another.]

[6:07] All of these enmeshed sounds make up our sonic worlds, and those worlds are changing as we confront a planetary scale force. Climate change has emerged as a leading crisis of our time and requires us to reimagine and reconsider seemingly everything—from our individual climate impacts to our collective ecological relationships. The division between human and nature has now become blurred.

[The dense soundscape crescendos, and then abruptly cuts to silence. The last sound present is the beating of your heart. Music begins to play. A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation.]

[6:49] Many have embraced the term “Anthropocene” to define our current moment in time when humanity has altered the planet to such an extent that the traces of our influence are now present within the Earth's strata (i.e. nuclear radiation, toxic emissions, microplastics). But not all humans have contributed equally to such violence against the planet, and not all resulting changes are evenly felt. Certain global systems like colonization and capitalism produce cascades of impact, which disproportionately affect those who have contributed least to climate change. The Anthropocene, as a concept, fails to capture these inequities. And while it is useful to help mark our current moment in time, sometimes a word alone just doesn't suffice.

[The music continues to play as additional melodic phrases enter the texture.]

[7:44] It is often difficult to talk about things at this scale. Sometimes there is a lack of vocabulary. Sometimes things are just so entangled and complex. And sometimes things at this scale will simply exist outside of our direct, everyday experience. They are not singular objects that you can manipulate at your will. You can't reach out and touch the Anthropocene. But perhaps you can listen to it. Listen to our changing worlds: to the ways that sound can overlap and cross boundaries and labels; to blend and resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations. Maybe sound and listening can aid when words fail and help create something for you, even if it's just a small shift in perspective.

[The music slowly fades to silence, and is replaced by a New York City soundscape. The spring rain patters against your umbrella. Cars, some northbound others soundbound, splash puddles across the warm asphalt. People mutter quiet conversations as they hurry along the sidewalk. Weather, technology, and people all resonate together.]

[9:05] What do you hear? Do you still hear rain in Manhattan? Or has your listening changed? Are these sounds somehow more connected than before? Connected to one another? And you to them? To answer these questions will require an exchange of energy, a means for perception, a relational endeavor. So...

[The New York City soundscape crescendos, and then abruptly cuts to silence. All the voices and sounds from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a collective gesture.]

[9:43] Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[All the sounds from season one begin to fade into your foreground.]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

Welcome to The Sonocene—ecological stories told through sound.

[The New York City soundscape assumes your foreground one last time. It slowly fades to silence.]

Become Rat

Some of the most widely-held sentiments toward NYC rats include disgust, fear, aversion, and horror. But how could these associations be challenged if we momentarily see or hear things from their perspective? How might our relationships to rats change in light of their ability to communicate and speak to one another?

For his project, Urban Intonation, Brian House (sound artist and Professor of Art at Amherst College) recorded rats on the streets of NYC using an ultrasonic microphone. He then pitch-shifted those recordings into the range of human hearing, capturing the uncanny speech-like sounds of rat communication.

In this episode, “Become Rat,” House tells a story about ultrasonic soundscapes, Urban Intonation, and the ecological relationships between humans and the Norwegian Brown Rat in New York City. All proceeds from this episode will be donated to Word Up Community Bookshop, a multilingual and collectively owned bookshop and arts space in Washington Heights. 

Further Resources

New York City's Wonder, Gal Nissim

See What Happens When You Tickle A Rat, National Geographic

Episode Transcript

[All the voices from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[High-pitched groans, followed by the sound of feet stomping against concrete and a forest soundscape, fade into your foreground. A subway car rattles and pedestrians shuffle along the sidewalk. These sounds begin to overlap and cycle, each assuming your foreground at different moments.]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “Become Rat” episode storyteller, Brian House, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[The wheels of a cart rattle against the cracks of street and sidewalk. People’s voices carry overhead. Steam issues from vents nearby. Cars drive close. Metal “clinks” as someone steps on a sewer grate. This is a soundscape from Times Square. You’re listening from ground level.]

[00:59] What is the soundscape of New York City? But not just soundscape in the sense of landscape or like background. What are the actual kinds of ecological relationships that we have in this place where I live? Who am I entangled with living in this city as I'm walking down the street? We have a complicated and symbiotic or parasitic or exploitative relationship with other creatures.

[1:42] In this case, we have the rat.

[A rat” squeaks” with a high-pitched intensity.]

And the rat is iconic on so many levels. You know, the rat kind of burrows its way throughout human culture.

[Different New York City residents share their thoughts about rats. This montage transitions between New York City residents and the episode storyteller, Brian House. A Washington Square Park soundscape can be heard in the background, providing a context from where residents are speaking. And this soundscape add an additional layer to the Times Square soundscape (still present, but sounding in the background).]

Big as fuck.

In the streets I'd rather not go near them.

I'm scared to death of them!

...disease infested.

[1:59] In New York we associate rats with trash. We associate them with the subway.

[An arriving Q train slowly grinds to a stop.]

Maybe it runs over your foot when it's running from trash bag to trash bag.

Sometimes I get spooked when they scurry across my feet when I'm walking.

Maybe it steals a piece of pizza and that becomes a meme online.

What I thought was a piece of squished pizza was actually a rat that had been runover and had its guts explode.

[2:23] It's gross. It does something with our expectations of how things should be. Well, you know, okay, there shouldn't be this animal right there invading our space in this way. Those are the kind of associations that there's an infestation. That it's vermin.

We think they're vermin who are disgusting...

That it's coming for us. That it's compromising in some way.

It really seems like rats run the city and not the humans.

[2:47] It's also an animal living on its own terms within the city and is, you know, partly responsible for making the city what it is.

We could probably learn from them. That's probably the irony.

Rats are living creatures just like humans, enjoying the crap that we don't.

Domesticated they're very intelligent, very smart, and very cute.

If I really meet one and I get to know them from the inside, I probably would sympathize maybe even empathize with one.

[3:16] What is it to become rat a little bit? What is it to what is it? To hear things from their perspectives? Does that do something for us in considering what it is that the city actually is?

[3:30] Today's storyteller is...

Brian House. I'm a sound artist and a professor of art at Amherst College.

[The soundscapes from Times Square and Washington Square Park fade to silence, as traffic and pedestrian noise from the corner of Lafayette and Broadway enter your foreground. You can distinctly hear the shuffling of footwear against the sidewalk, which pans from left to right. You’re still listening from groundlevel.]

[3:48] Every City Hall likes to declare its war on rats. I mean, this goes back decades where there's this idea that we're going to eradicate rats from New York City. And I think that approach, you know, whether it's the “Rat Czar” or “The War on Rats” or, you know, whether it's control of populations or extermination. This kind of language, it makes it about the rat. It makes it sound like it's the rats fault. The presence of rats in a neighborhood indicates that there are other structural issues going on. There's not the attention paid by City Services that probably there should be. There's human issues going on. And I think City Hall likes to make it about the rat because that's easier to solve. Well, of course, it will never be solved. But it's avoidance from maybe solving some of these other more fundamental issues with poverty that should be addressed.

[The soundscape from Lafayette and Broadway fade to silence, as an evening soundscape from Chapramari Wildlife Sanctuary at the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, enters your foreground. Birds chirp. Cricket lull. The forest canopy sings.]

[4:54] And as for the arrival of the rat: the Brown Rat is not the same as the Black Rat that was involved in the plague in Europe. The Brown Rat actually is indigenous to Central Asia, but at a certain point that rat figured out that human trade routes were good places to find food. The rat had this idea of like, okay, let's tag along with humans and see what happens.

[The Himalayan soundscape fades to silence as the sound of waves crashing upon a beach enters your foreground. Ocean meets land at the Coney Island beach. Waves continue to rhythmically rise and fall, rise and fall.]

[5:25] And so the trade routes along the Silk Road is what originally brought the Brown Rat all throughout Central Asia and into Europe. And then, of course, it was the ships leaving from Europe that then spread it across all the colonial enterprises throughout the world to those port cities and to those urban areas. So the arrival of the Brown Rat in New York, you know, has everything to do with New York being a port of trade. From the earliest then associations of rats hanging out with humans—rats have always been capitalists, I think—it's been about trade and exchange. What is our relationship to that rat and are there an acoustics to that? Could I think of that relationship through sound or could I record that relationship somehow?

[The sounds of ocean waves fades to silence, as a strident vocal tone enters your foreground. It seems like a novel sound, and yet, uncannily similar to song or speech. This sound soon fades to silence.]

[6:29] Sound is not on the electromagnetic spectrum, right? Sound isn't a thing…

[A sine wave briefly sounds in rhythmic unison with the storyteller’s voice.]

in and of itself. It's vibrations in air…

[A lower-pitched sine wave slowly bends and alternates frequency.]

…in a space. We can hear a certain frequency range of those vibrations,

[The frequency alterations increase rate, and then move with a glissando effect from a lower pitch to a higher pitch. Once again, this gesture is rhythmically-aligned with the storyteller’s description of “20 times a second, up to 20,000 times a second.” Once the glissando reaches its highest pitch, it abruptly returns to the slow undulations of the original low-frequency sine wave.]

classically from 20 hertz up to 20 kilohertz. So that's vibrations at 20 times a second, up to 20,000 times a second.

[6:57] That has to do just with the human apparatus for hearing. And of course, different people hear different amounts or not at all, depending on your body's facility. So we have these terms infrasonic and ultrasonic, which are anthropocentric terms.

[Extremely low and high frequencies sound out as the storyteller states “lower than we can hear” and “above what we can hear.”]

Infrasonic just means sound lower than we can hear and ultrasonic is sound above what we can hear.

[7:22] Rats have a different range of hearing. Somewhere in the hundreds of hertz is their lower range of hearing. And then it goes up to nearly a hundred kilohertz. That's a much wider range than us, particularly in the higher registers.

[The oscillating sine wave fades to silence as the original Times Square soundscape returns. People talk. Cars “honk” and idle. Feet shuffle in the hustle and bustle of the city.]

[7:40] Now, microphones, of course, have been made with human hearing in mind. So most microphones throughout the history of recording are really optimized for frequency ranges around the human voice. So an ultrasonic mike is something that's been designed to be able to go above that. What I needed to make recordings of rats was something that was, first of all, portable, something that can record for a long period of time, because I wanted to let this out for, you know, whether it's 24 hours or 48 hours. I'm not going to chase around a rat with a microphone. I want to hear them talking to themselves when I'm not around. What I ended up doing was putting together a small computer, a Raspberry Pi Computer is what they're called, together with a battery pack. And that managed the recording and recorded the audio onto an SD card. In order to leave those electronics out, I put it all in a rat trap. Those little black boxes that you see everywhere all the time. And that's infrastructure that we ignore because we don't want to know what's going on there, you know, whether it's poison or rat carcass or, you know, something disgusting. Just like all things rat, that's something we'd rather not pay conscious attention to. It's part of that kind of subliminal infrastructure of the city. So the rats didn't care so much. It was more about keeping it away from the humans.

[9:13] So I would put all this recording equipment into a rat trap and then leave it out. And the rats would come out and have their conversations and then that would be recorded onto the computer. I would then come and collect that hardware. I had to learn what do rat vocalizations look like when you visualize the audio signal in a way that you can see the shapes of the frequencies and the amplitude envelopes. Then I would take that signal, pitch it down so that then I could listen to it. The material that I'm working with is the recording from the street, but now a way that we can hear it in some approximation of how of how the rat does. What is it to become rat a little bit. What is it to? What is it to hear things from their perspective? Does that do something for us in considering what it is that the city actually is?

[The Times Square soundscape fades to silence as a the previous song/speech-like sound returns. You begin to realize that these must be recordings of rats. The noises are multi-layered, complex, and not unlike the sounds that humans can make. Some of the tones are short and rhythmic, others are very lengthy and drawn out.]

[10:47] You're hearing audio, which is from the project called Urban Intonation. And for this work I recorded rats at multiple sites on the streets of New York City with an ultrasonic microphone. And then resampled and pitch shifted those recordings into the range of the human voice and mixed it for playback over a human public address system. And that makes rat noise in public space, something that's suddenly recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech.

[The recordings from Urban Intonation continue to sound.]

[11:36] You know, what are the rats saying to each other? Are these merely vocalizations, or can we call this speech? And I mean, I think I like leaving that as a question. To me, listening to them it's very complex. It's sophisticated. It's talking about life in New York City. It's talking about experience and aspiration and desire and feeling and all of these things that we're talking about in New York City as well. And of course, one of the really striking things with rats is that they laugh. So something that we hear in the audio is rat laughter.

[The unmistakable sound of airy, rhythmic laughter plays from the recording.]

[12:16] These sounds are something that are not all that foreign to the sounds that I can make. You know, that kind of resonance, I think, is very powerful. This is like one of the hallmarks of human intelligence or one of the things we pride ourselves on is that, okay, we're the speaking animal, and other animals do not. That's maybe a little bit more of a continuum than than a binary. All animals communicate. All animals are sensitive to each other and to other species in various ways. What gets to count as speech is, of course, a political issue. A non-speaking animal doesn't have rights in the way that that a speaking animal, aka a human, does.

[13:07] Clearly we have to rethink our relationships, our social relationships among humans and and more than humans, because the way we've conceived of individuality and society and interdependence in general the terms are off. Because we're in a system now that is unsustainable. I mean, the the kind of neoliberal proliferation of a capital mindset is ultimately exploitative in this unsustainable way. And of course that's a policy problem. That's an economic problem. That's a moral problem. But it is a philosophical problem. It is how do we position ourselves in relationship to each other and how do we even understand the individual and the boundaries of self?

[14:07] We accept by default that there's these divisions between ourselves and the non-human world, between nature and culture. And there's something to learn about ourselves when we realize that that's not always the case. As an artist trying to complicate or destabilize the ways in which we're experiencing the world and get around some of the filters or assumptions or the basic terms that are in place that are maybe not working—maybe that will do something. You know? If nothing else, to try to bear witness to other truths and ways of being that are not captured in the predominant language about humans and environment and climate change and whatever else.

[The recordings of rat speech begin to slowly fade to silence.]

I mean, that spiritual change has to be a deep one, like an embodied one. It's a weird one. And so the fact that sound can get inside us can vibrate us in different ways, can address us on the level of affect even before we know what emotion we're feeling—that's an opportunity.

[The recordings of rat speech slowly fade to your foreground.]

[15:37] Hearing how the rats are communicating amongst themselves is a nice shift in perspective because they're inhabiting the city and navigating the city. And it's not it's not always about us. Obviously humans have an outsized influence, but they're adapted to to live with us.

[The opening soundscape from Times Square begins to blend with the sounds of rat communication.]

[16:05] What is the soundscape of New York City? And that's what I realized then that really fascinated me was that we make a lot of sound in the city and it makes it very hard for a lot of different animals to live in the city. But for a rat, this sound is happening really at the lower end of their frequency spectrum. The rat is hearing and talking above our range of hearing. It has its own sonic world. And the city is, you know, sounds very different out there.

[High-pitched rat “squeaking” slowly lowers pitch and transforms into the recordings of Urban Intonation. While this occurs, the soundscape of Times Square also lowers pitch. It is as if you, as a human listener, have entered into a soundscape of New York City—but one that, heretofore, has only been accessible to rats.]

Urban Intonation. This project wouldn't have been possible without the support of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. And also Eyebeam.

The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to Word-Up Community Bookshop. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.

The Black Bean

In 2020, Hannibal Bracey created the Instagram page @TheBlackBeanNYC, which is dedicated to reviewing BIPOC-owned and operated coffee institutions throughout NYC. Partly inspired by his own experiences of exclusion and racism in various coffee shops, Bracey hopes to use @TheBlackBeanNYC to empower local communities and businesses that were hit hard during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode, “The Black Bean,” Hannibal Bracey tells a story about his personal love of coffee, the emerging Black coffee culture movement in New York City, his family’s dedication to activism, and the colonial legacy of coffee production and consumption. For him, ecological change is not just environmental, but social as well. And that change comes about “one cup at a time.”

All proceeds from this episode will be donated to Together We Thrive, an NYC-based coalition that provides access to capital, social networks and technical assistance to support the survival, success and sustainability of Black-owned businesses.

Further Resources

@TheBlackBeanNYC

Coffee Cart to Cafe Owner feat. Nigel Price, 95+ Podcast

Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins, Carole Boston Weatherford

Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World, Michael Pollan

Episode Transcript

[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[Patrons chat quietly. A coffee bean grinder grinds. A finger taps a piece of plastic. The soundscape of a coffee shop enters your foreground.]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “The Black Bean” episode storyteller, Hannibal Bracey, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[Water falls from a sink faucet, and a pitcher begins to fill with the cool liquid. A plastic lid snaps into place, as the pitcher is set on a magnetic housing. The water begins to heat.]

[00:53] It was a personal passion project of mine. @TheBlackBeanNYC, start the page and start highlighting all of the businesses I wanted to go to. Going there, getting the feel, trying the coffee, talking to the owners, seeing the neighborhoods and all of that stuff. You know, it started from there. So…

[As the storyteller speaks, a bag crinkles in the background. Water heats and a bag of coffee beans is inspected.]

Today's storyteller is…

Hannibal Bracey, The Black Bean, King! You know, whatever you wanna call me. Haha!

[The bag of coffee continues to crinkle from inquisitive hands. It’s as if someone is attempting to find the best method for opening the bag of whole beans.]

[1:27] First of all, I start off with a good bag of coffee.

[Finally, the bag is pried open with a forceful “snap.” Other “snaps” and “clicks” signal that the opening is being widened.]

[1:37] I like to look into the bag. See the design of the bag. See what country it's from. See who my money's going to and going towards to help, as far as like sustainability. You want to get the best coffee, but also use the best product—the best fair product—so look for sustainability as well as taste.

[Coffee beans cascade into a small glass bowl with a soft series of “tink-tink-tink’s.” The magnetic pitcher continues its slow hum as the temperature of water rises.”

[2:07] So I weigh it on the scale. Weigh about 30 grams of coffee, maybe 40.

[Fingers tap the back of the bag, making sure just the right amount of beans escape.Then, the beans are swiftly poured into a plastic enclosure with a sharp, “shiiiick!” The water continues to rise in temperature (its “hum” grows louder).]

[2:18] You grind your beans.

[A coffee bean grinder activates. Its drone is aggressive. After a moment, the aggressive drone gives way to a higher-pitched whine, as all the beans have been pulverized into fine grounds. The water pitcher “clicks” to completion as the water finally boils. The plastic cup, holding the coffee grounds, slides from the grinder.]

[2:41] You put your beans in the filter and sit it on top of the scale.

[Coffee grounds fall into a paper filter with a warm, friction-like slide. Fingers clean the plastic cup—rubbing all the grounds from the cup into the filter. The cup is replaced in the grinder with a “thud.” And fingers return, this time compressing the grounds within the filter in clockwise circles. This creates the coffee bed. Skin-to-skin friction sounds out, as someone cleans their hands of fine coffee grounds. Hot water meets coffee grounds, “plopping” and “churning” together in the filter.]

[3:04] Sometimes in my mind I'm just like alright, pour for this amount of time. 30 seconds versus another 30 seconds versus another. You know, as soon as you put the first one, I shake it up. Shake the coffee bed up.

[A “fizzy” sound begins as the water continues to pour over the coffee bed. Small “drip, drip, drips” begin as fresh coffee fills the bottom of the pour over pitcher.]

[3:35] I get some oat milk with that and then, boom! My Chemex and oatmeal, that's my morning.

[Someone slurps a fresh cup of coffee. A guttural “swallow” resounds satisfaction. A saxophone melody enters the background.]

One cup at a time.

[The saxophone is joined by voices of patrons, milk frothers, and coffee bean grinders. These sounds blend together and create the soundscape of a coffee shop, which has now entered your foreground.]

[4:42] And I love this sound, that feeling, just I'm in the shop. Good vibes, good energy. It's like a feeling of, like, comfort. Say, a comfort sound.

[People continue to chat. Cafe machines continue to thrum. A piano melody takes the place of the saxophone.]

[5:10] I've been going to coffee shops in New York City since about 2012. I'm a face of this coffee culture movement that's going on right now that a lot of people may not even know about.

[5:36] Around that time, 2020, you saw a lot of places shut down and you couldn't really go anywhere. A lot of protests, a lot of racial tensions in the city. I felt like it was important to highlight businesses in the Black community, especially that were hit hard around like the pandemic time and all of that. I started to look for a different spaces that I felt comfortable in with different shops throughout the city and the inclusive shops that I felt like comfortable staying around just like, I guess that feeling of home right there. I want people to find those spaces. It's more than a coffee, just like a safe space to create ideas, to brainstorm. Just where a gathering space where like minded people are able to get together and, you know, just feel at home, feel comfort.

One cup at a time.

[The soundscape of the coffee shop continues. It is a calm and peaceful atmosphere.]

[7:08] I come from a long line of people that's always been progressive in moving forward and fighting for the right side. My mom's a teacher. My grandmother was an educator. My mom would do a lot of protests in the 1960's and stuff like that, go to DC with my dad. So then as far as Black Businesses, that's in my blood. And so, just in general, I always was taught to support the community. We're not going to take things as they are. We're going to try to make things better. You never should look at yourself or your community, how the world views you. A lot of times the way I felt in a lot of coffee shops just in different neighborhoods, depending on where you are. Whether do they think you should be there or not, when clearly anyone should be here. If I'm buying a coffee, why shouldn't I be here? And especially being an African-American, a black person in America. If you don't know your history and where your people come from, you're liable to take anyone's. You know, it's a lot of negative stuff that you can form a lot of self-hate from. I was always taught to know your history. Know that you come from greatness and you will be greatness. The Greensboro Four was a sit-in. Four black people, went into the coffee shop and refused to leave. It was a Woolworth's counter. I have that spirit, for real. They were like "F*** it!" They asked for coffee, which was dope. That was the part of history that asked for coffee and didn't get up. It's always been that way with the fight for civil rights and people of color stuff, But now it's like we don't want our spaces. It used to be like, people would be like, can we get a seat at the table so we can get, you know, their table? Now they're like, F*** your table. We want our own. We're creating our own. That's the, you know, we don't care about the table. We don't want to see that. We have our own counterculture, our own coolness. I feel like that's what's going on now.

One cup at a time.

[The soundscape of the coffee shop continues unchanged. It’s as if you are listening to the storyteller, within the coffee shop itself. You’re surrounded by other patrons and light, jazzy music.]

[9:52] Like downtown Brooklyn and just hanging out there. But then I would see this coffee shop: Drip. They had pour over and just the shop was so cool. And then the owner was so cool. I put it on my page (@TheBlackBeanNYC). And he's always been like, "reach out to me if you want anything," or just try to help or anything that I need in the coffee community because he's been doing it for a while. And he started with a coffee cart, just like a little small coffee cart making pour over coffee in the park. It looked like some times he was at Fort Green. So he built his thing up from doing a coffee cart and stuff like that. And he inspires me a lot. Wherever you live, you should add to it. And that is the thing about New York. A lot of people come to this city and just want to take, take, take, take, take! Like, that's the city. But that's a lot of people's mentality.

I always see what I can provide and give back to the community because I just see how the poverty versus like the rich versus poor versus like... You go down one street is million dollar houses. You go to another: ceilings are leaking! The problems of the city and the struggle and the people that live here, I want toprovide hope and just actually help people and like not just take. One day, I'm going to go by the train station and just make people coffee. They're just going to the train and just seeing how they doing. And that's part of community. And I do that just, you know, just 'cause. I can make somebody day better. It's small but it's big. Little steps push the big steps.

One cup at a time.

[The soundscape of the coffee shop, once again returns to your foreground.]

[11:56] There's the Coffee Community, and then there's like the Black Coffee Community it's even smaller. Even in my own community of Canarsie, that's another thing that I want more like in those type of neighborhoods to get more people interested. Because a lot of people don't think that coffee shops are a Black thing. So I'm here to say it is, and it's a product that's grown by you that comes from you. Coffee was started in Ethiopia and Yemen. Those are like one of the first civilizations. It's a couple stories. One says a goat herder was throwing beans into the fire and then it started to, you know, crackle up. And then there's another story saying that the goat herder was wondering why his goat was so excited with the energy and it was eating those red beans. What do these red beans do? So then they started to roast them. And then, boom, some of the first coffee. It's grown in the most perfect atmosphere. The perfect heat, plus the perfect moisture, equal the perfect beans. And it grows in a specific area. By that, I mean, nine times out of ten, you're getting your beans from a Black or Brown country: Ethiopia, Jamaica, Hawaiian, Columbia. Picking them, opening them, cleaning them, to roasting them. Ecological is more than just like where it's being grown, like ecological as in it's part of the social aspect as well. You know, the hard work that it came to your cup, it came to your neighborhood, and then the shops, you know, a little fun coffee shops that's in your neighborhood? People don't even think about that. So number one, I would say, that I love about coffee is the people. The people behind the coffee that actually get it to the whole world that people forget about.

[13:55] The second thing I like about coffee is the ritual aspect of it. I like that it brings together people. As I was growing up, my mom would always start off the day with coffee. She sitting at the table like, "How y'all's day doing? Or what are y'all about to do?" So it's so important in so many people's lives. I just, as far as pulling people together, like a conversation-starter. If you see any of your friends now you haven't seen in a while, you see anybody, you're like, "Hey, you want to get some coffee?" You know, you might not even want coffee, but it's just like a way to connect. That's another aspect that I love about coffee, just that connecting people.

[14:44] It's part of, like, moving forward the coffee, but also progression in society with accepting different cultures and accepting people for who they are and not judging who you are. Coffee is the vehicle. You know, I didn't really… I didn't even know it was going to be the vehicle. I do so much stuff. But this is the vehicle that's going to, you know, help everybody, help cultures and different stuff like that—one cup at a time.

[The soundscape of the coffee shop continues. Although, the sounds from the opening of the episode return—water filling a pitcher, fingers dusting-off coffee grounds, pour-over coffee brews. All of these sounds begin to blend, and slowly crescendo in volume and intensity.]

[15:28] You sit there, you drink a cup of coffee, and you just figure out like, "Oh, where does this coffee come from?" I'm a face of this coffee culture movement that's going on right now that a lot of people, you know, might not even know about. I mean, I've been concrete my whole life. I've dealt with a lot of stuff. I'm the type who's going to find a rose in a concrete. How can I change anything to make it better? One cup at a time.

[All the sounds surge in volume, but suddenly cut to silence—replaced by a strident “slurp!” Someone’s content “gulp” of a fresh cup of coffee slowly fades to silence.]

[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]

Good energy, good vibes to whoever is listening. Shout out to them!

The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to Together We Thrive Coalition. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.

Compost Cycles

Compost is not soil but a soil amendment, which means that you add compost to soil in order to reintroduce nutrients to those microbiomes. Beyond its ability to foster healthy plant growth or green spaces in urban environments, healthy soil can also sequester carbon and mitigate flooding events. Therefore, incorporation of compost within soil can help reverse some effects of climate change that we currently face today. 

In this episode, “Compost Cycles,” Renée Crowley (Deputy Director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center) tells a story about a local compost program in New York City. Crowley discusses how the creation, collection, processing, and reuse and integration of food-waste is a cyclical process and sustainable application of our food resources. 

All proceeds from this episode will be donated to the Lower East Side Ecology Center, a community-based organization that offers e-waste and composting services, environmental stewardship opportunities, and educational programming to all New Yorkers.

Further Resources

NYC's Master Composter Certificate Course

Food Scrap drop-off sites across NYC

Institute for Local Self Reliance's Community Composting Resources

Episode Transcript

[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[Volunteer workers apply compost to a garden bed. The bag of compost rustles. Community garden visitors chat softly nearby. Birds chirp. Truck reverses with a “beep, beep, beep!”]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “Compost Cycles” episode storyteller, Renée Crowley, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[A child hums a melody. The ambient drone of traffic sounds resounds across a public plaza. Somewhere closeby, a police vehicle triggers a single siren warning. Closer, and within your foreground, someone rustles a bag of food scraps and empties them into a large plastic bin.]

[1:00] We're getting people to drop off their food scraps at a farmer's market. We're able to follow those food scraps to a compass facility where finished material is generated. And then that finished compost ends up back on a farm or back in a garden where vegetables can be grown. And you can eat those vegetables again and cook them up. And then you can empty those leftover scraps or leftover food that you didn't quite get to. It ends up back in a compost pile. And it's this cycle of regeneration of our food resources. It's definitely a circular process.

[People continue to deposit food scraps. The soundscape of Union Square Market remains in your foreground.]

[1:41] Today's storyteller is...

My name is Renée Crowley. I'm the deputy director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center.

[Plastic bags rustle. A small container “taps” against a larger container. And a paper bag is ripped (in unison with the storyteller’s description.]

[2:02] Plastic bag rustling. Some paper bags kind of being like smushed and torn, which people do a lot of times when they bring their scraps in a paper bag and they empty the contents and then they tear the paper bag to be composted as well. All the different collection vessels being like rustled, torn, and even some sounded like they were like being banged onto the the outer rim of our collection container.

[The market soundscape continues. Someone violently shakes a plastic bag empty.]

[2:43] People come out for this weekly ritual of dropping off their food scraps with us. At these drop off sites, there can be from like 1 to 15 of these green, bright green plastic containers. They're about 64 gallons in size, and when they're full can end up weighing up to about like almost like 250, 300 pounds.

[The wheels of large plastic containers rhythmically “clip-clop” against concrete pavers.]

[3:12] At the end of this kind of drop off period is when our staff come with one of our trucks.

[A bay door is cast open on the back of a box truck. A mechanic lift is engaged.]

[3:36] And takes the now full containers and puts them into the back of our truck, which is now destined to a compost facility.

[A truck engine revs to life. It idles momentarily and then slowly drives away. The truck and market sounds are replaced by the calm “hum” of the highway. The acoustics of the space situate your listening from within the truck itself. Soon the truck passes over a bridge with consistent “da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunks.”]

[4:09] Right now we are bringing all of our food scraps to the Staten Island Compost Facility. Hear the wheels of the vehicle hitting different like pavement structures? And I'm pretty sure it's the BQE where it goes like, "da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk."

[A turn signal begins— “click-click-click-click.” The engine shifts gears as the truck accelerates after a turn. The truck slows to a stop. The E-brake is engaged. A window rolls down. A seatbelt detaches. And the truck door swings open. An alarm begins, “beep beep beep,” confirming the open door. The door is shut.]

[4:43] When the truck arrived at the Staten Island Compost Facility. You can kind of hear all these other like beeps of vehicles or other equipment happening in the background. And so you get like a vibe that there is kind of other activities happening (more mechanical activities happening).

[The driver returns to the vehicle. The truck’s driver-side door is opened and closed. And the driver starts the engine. These sounds fade away, replaced by the ambient resonance of a large, outdoor facility. Bins are pulled out of the back of the truck within this space, echoing across concrete walls and a tall ceiling. Bolts “rattle” and lids “slam” as the bins are moved and prepared to empty.]

[5:08] The contents of the bins are emptied. They are then formed into a compost pile. Those food scraps are typically mixed with another material, which is usually woodchips or wood shavings, some kind of like carbon rich woody material.

[The bins are loaded onto a mechanic lift—“THUD!” And the machine whines loudly as it upends the bin. The food scraps, from within the bin, lazily fall into a pile. Loose pieces roll downward until they come to a final stop.]

[5:35] Over the course of 3 to 6 months, the compost piles are turned using large scale equipment.

[The “hum” of a machine drones on. Bits of food scraps and woodchips “click” against the metal grates of the machine.]

They're kind of managed for their moisture levels and their oxygen levels. At the end of that 3 to 6 months period, all of those food scraps are decomposed and you're left with finished compost.

[The machine fades to silence. Crossfade to chirping birds and children playing. Light traffic can be heard in the distance. This is the soundscape of Tompkins Square Park. A Lower East Side Ecology Center staff member addresses a small group of volunteer workers: “It's super hard to like, dig in there. But we just want to make sure that you can create a little bit of forest space at the top, like, inch of the soil. Because as you can see, it's delivered there…”]

[6:09] Compost is technically the finished product after organic materials have gone through a decomposition process.

[The soundscape of Tompkins Square Park continues in the background. But the sounds of churning dirt, raking leaves, and working bags of compost enter your foreground. The volunteer workers begin working in the community garden area. They are clearing and preparing different garden beds in order to apply compost to the soil.]

It looks a lot like soil. It's really dark in color. A lot of people call it Black Gold because it's this like nutrient rich, decomposed organic matter. Finished compost isn't soil, it's a soil amendment. And so it's something that you're adding to an existing soil to add life to it, to add nutrients back to an existing soil.

[The sounds of public gardening crossfade to unnatural “clicking” sounds. There is almost no ambience to these sounds—as if muffled in some way. A contact microphones captures the sounds of hands working compost into soil. A pitch filter has been added to this recording in an attempt to imagine what organic life moving and thriving in soil might sound like. The underground soundscape continues to “click” in quirky patterns.]

[6:50] The process of decomposition is like magic to me. Alright, so what's actually happening is you've got food scraps, which are this like nitrogen rich ingredient. You want to mix those nitrogen rich ingredients with a carbon rich ingredient, such as woodchips or leaves or wood shavings. But you're basically creating an ecosystem for bacteria, fungi, worms, all these other decomposers to thrive. You're creating a habitat for all these decomposing organisms to kind of flock to the pile and do the magic that they're kind of put on this earth to do.

[The underground soundscape fades to silence, as the soundscape of public gardening returns. A volunteer worker rakes a pile of leaves, and then scrapes a top layer of soil.]

[7:47] So us as humans, when we're creating these compost piles, like sure, we're doing the work of mixing the ingredients, turning the piles.

[The raking and scraping swell in volume, as the hum of a compost processing machine joins the crescendo. Then, there is a hard cut back to the underground soundscape as the storyteller says, “but what’s happening at a microscopic scale…”]

But what's happening at a microscopic scale is like much bigger than what we're able to do with our two hands.

[The quirky “clicking” of subterranean life continues.]

[8:08] And what's happening in the soil that helps create a rich environment for plants to grow is that there's this like reciprocal relationship between the roots that are growing underground to the bacteria that are eating other ingredients in the soil, excreting and creating nutrients for the roots of the plants to take up. It's this whole underground ecosystem of further resource recycling and the plants taking those resources and taking them up into the plant to grow zucchinis, to grow your tomatoes. And so adding compost to your soil is kind of creating that ecosystem of life to further support healthy plants and growing food.

[The underground soundscape fades to silence, as another community garden soundscape enters your foreground. A machine churns compost and soil. People casually chat. Birds chirp. Construction equipment sounds nearby. Someone rakes a garden bed, pulls weeds, and picks up trash.]

[9:26] Recognizing from a larger systematic point of view when food scraps or organic materials end up in a landfill and they're trapped underground and they start to decompose underground, they generate methane, and methane is a super potent greenhouse gas. So step one, we shouldn't be putting our organic waste into a landfill. Composting uses an aerobic process where you're able to take those food scraps and organic waste, make finished compost, apply that finished compost onto land or to soil and make healthy soil. And what healthy soils are really good at is sequestering or kind of capturing or holding on to that excess carbon that is in our atmosphere. Healthy soils are able to reverse the effects of climate change.

[The garden soundscape cross fades to the sounds of Coney Island Beach. Seagulls call. Ocean waves crash against the land.]

[10:29] Healthy soils with compost applied to them act more like a sponge and they're able to hold stormwater. This is really important when it comes to flooding events that we experience. Soils that aren't healthy, water just runs over the surface of them and ends up in our sewers and ends up polluting our rivers and our oceans. But if a soil can absorb that water, it's better able to prevent runoff issues and overburden sewer systems, which is a big problem in New York City.

[11:10] Why aren't all food scraps being composted and helping us limit and minimize the impacts of climate change that we're having right now?

[The sounds of Coney Island Beach fade to silence, as the sound of (yet another) community garden enters your foreground. A volunteer worker rips the top of a bag filled with compost. They begin to dump out small portions of compost in order to integrate it within the soil.]

[11:35] I think at the root of community-based composting is an interest and a passion and a commitment to stewardship.

[The volunteer continues to dump and integrate compost. There is also the sound of a cart rolled over concrete pavers, as more bags of compost are delivered to a garden bed.]

[11:53] The application of compost is almost this final act of adding life back into that soil that has been neglected, whether it was through the industrial history of New York City. Of polluting our soils with trash and with chemicals. Or just the neglect of not thinking of our city as like a green space and just kind of pigeonholing it into this like urban concrete jungle. There is so much life in the city. These are our natural resources. These are these, like precious pockets of greenspace we have in the city. Let's care for them. Let's let's give them some TLC.

[The soundscape of Tompkins Square Park returns to your foreground. A Lower East Side Ecology Center staff member addresses a small group of volunteer workers: “And in terms of our stewardship, our parklands, our street tress can really provide a ton of benefits to us. So can our soil. So, for me…” Digging in dirt. Pouring finished compost. Using tools. The sounds of volunteer garden and compost workers takes over your listening experience.]

[12:55] We work a lot with community gardens who are composting and host volunteer work days where we come together at these community gardens. We might do some compost application events. We will go to a block in the Lower East Side and clean up the tree pits and then apply finished compost to this tree pit. So we're adding nutrients back to the soil that does exist on our urban concrete sidewalks.

[The sounds of gardening crossfade to friends laughing and chatting together.]

[13:24] So we do these cooking with food scraps, demonstrations.

[People fill a small room. One says, “Is that a Jalapeño?” Another person says, “It turned over.” The dialoge continues, “Oh my goodness, you've got a whole bag of herbs!” Laughing continues.]

[13:37] Carrot tops, they're onion skins, other materials that might be trickier or hard to use in your cooking, but definitely have ways to be reused.

[Vegetables sizzle in a hot pan. A cook explains, “so we're just going to, you know, very basic start to any recipe. You've all probably done this many times.” A wooden spoon thuds against the food in the pan. The cook is stirring the soon-to-be meal. She continues, “I think our stock is done, too. So I'm going to turn it off and I'll bring it over and give you all a…” Cooking sounds begin to lower in volume. As garden sounds enter your listening experience. All the sounds from the episode begin to blend and overlap.]

[14:15] I like to think of our work as kind of creating these like human networks of people all coming together around this, like shared passion for composting and waste reduction and community care. The work that we do, much like the work of our fungal networks are doing in our compost pile, is creating a process of reciprocity. Where, we're taking people's food scraps, we are transforming those food scraps into a finished compost material, that then is coming back to those communities and rebuilding the soils in the communities that are generating these food scraps. And so there's like a human, biological, fungal, bacterial, like we're all kind of connected in this process of composting in New York City.

[All the sounds from the episode continue to blend and overlap with growing intensity. Machines hum. Lifts strain. Food sizzles. Microbial organisms “click.” Leaves shuffle. People chat. And the compost cycle resounds across the city.]

[15:22] And I think that's just really beautiful as a way to break down these barriers of connecting with our natural world and our microbial world.

[All the sounds swell in volume and hard cut to the original soundscape of Union Square Park. People deposit their food scraps. Paper bags rip. Plastic bags shake. And small containers are struck against the compost drop-off bins.]

[15:41] It's definitely a circular process.

[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]

[16:14] If you ever have a chance to turn a compost pile or get your hands in the process of food waste, decomposition, go for it. It is like pure magic seeing food scraps be transformed into something totally else.

[16:30] The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to the Lower East Side Ecology Center. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.

Following Coyotes

The presence of coyotes in New York City may seem contradictory, as wild animals living in such a densely populated city might be hard to believe. However, numerous packs of coyotes have been able to thrive across the city’s pockets of green space. 

In this episode, “Following Coyotes,” Jay Simpson (artist-researcher and National Geographic Explorer) tells a story about coyotes, soundscape ecology, and how to listen to a landscape. Drawing from his research and sensory ethnography practice, Simpson leads us along coyote paths that run throughout Pugsley Creek Park, along Westchester Creek, and throughout Ferry Point Park in the Bronx. We’re able to hear the extent of noise pollution within these environments, and the ways coyotes and humans can co-create city spaces. What can we learn about New York City, about our notions of a “wild” nature, and about environmental change as we walk along the pathways of coyotes? 

All proceeds from this episode will be donated to the Gotham Coyote Project, a collective of researchers, educators, and students working together to study the ecology of the northeastern coyote in New York City and the region.

Further Resources

Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlast, Denis Wood

"Queer Ecology" by Catriona Sandilands from Keywords for Environmental Studies (Eds. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow)

More About Jay Simpson

Episode Transcript

[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[Leaves “crunch” under the weight of footsteps. An engine revs as a truck accelerates. A pack of coyotes “yelp, yelp, yelp!” Water laps against a shoreline.]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “Following Coyotes” episode storyteller, Jay Simpson, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[A microphone signal crackles. Auditory haptics skew your listening experience. You hear bits and pieces of a voice and a place, until a clear auditory signal reaches your ears. The storyteller is speaking to you from a fieldsite, clearly holding a microphone and explaining the surrounding environment.]

[00:39] And when sharing it with an audience being able to... translate. Being able to translate these moments into something that helps them understand what was I actually picking up when I was in that environment? So currently, I just plugged in my two stereo microphones and these allow me to choose what location do I want to place, what what are the things that I really want to focus in on without having this kind of wide-open ear to all of the landscape, I can really focus in on sounds. So I'm going to walk back to the shoreline, which was a very frequent place for me to be able to record. Because this was where mud is, this is where you can find tracks of the animals. You can see who’s coming and going very easily on the shoreline.

[1:48] Today's storyteller is...

Jay Simpson. I'm a National Geographic explorer and interdisciplinary artist and researcher.

[Coyotes begin to “yelp”]

[2:30] I study coyotes in New York City, which in itself sounds like a contradiction because New York City is the epitome of the concrete jungle, its epitome of man's control over nature.

[An airplane rumbles slowly overhead. A truck engine rumbles as another truck “beeps” in reverse.]

[2:41] The truth is, we don't have that grip over nature that we thought we did. Walk along the sidewalk and the concrete is cracked and there's weeds pushing up from the edges. Tree trunks still bend around fence posts. And nature is eroding and recreating and co-creating the city with us.

[A truck passes with quick acceleration. Bike gears “click” as tires turn. A car honks a horn.]

[3:26] Coyotes are a fascinating research collaborator because they really challenge our boundaries of where we expect wild things to live and where they want to live. We can detour into the history of that, where the colonization of America was made both in expelling Native Americans from the land, but also in expelling wildlife, specifically wolves and coyotes. And where we were successful in eradicating wolves, coyotes evaded us because they were never the big guy on the block. From the pressure of wolves hunting them, they were always much more suspect and watchful and curious and tricky. So they carry all these ecological traits from this history of growing up next to wolves that made them harder for us to eradicate. And when we removed wolves from the landscape through poisoning entire mountainsides and hunting and trapping and removing their prey species, coyotes flourished. The first coyotes to come to New York City were found in the Bronx in 1994 and in Manhattan in 1999. And now coyotes are found in every borough. Now that coyotes have found their home in these U.S. cities, they challenge us to reconceive of what urban space is and what it can be home to.

[The sounds of biking along a busy street are sped-up to an insanely quick speed! After the timelapse, the sounds of water lapping against land enter your foreground. Storyteller, Jay Simpson, speaks while standing near Westerchester Creek.]

[5:23] So we just biked from the western side of Westchester Creek and coming over to the eastern side, like looking back. We just went through this huge pocket of noise, huge like wave of traffic. And I can look across the creek and where we are is basically the same. Both sides, just these tiny pockets of weeds and trash debris smashed up against concrete boulders. And between us is a river. But just on the other side of these pockets of weeds are cement blocks piled up as walls. There's really no space on the edge of its creek. It's lost most of its actual kind of habitat along the shoreline. And as we're biking across it, I'm thinking of how miserable this connection route is. I realized, like, we're here now in a park and we just left another park. And how that mirrors coyotes that came to this area, they can't just live within the park. That's not enough space. It's not enough resources for them. And in between these islands, we have these like, seas of noise and traffic and disturbance that makes it really dangerous for them to be able to move between makes it really dangerous to be able to live and not get hit by a car. Also attracting attention to themselves, the coyote running down the street in that part of the Bronx is likely to garner attention from the police. And we just mirrored what these coyotes did of just leaping from one park, kind of following the water's edge as closely as possible to get to another park. Kind of then rest and see what's around, see if you can find any food, if you're a coyote, and then you're going to keep moving. And just constantly looking for these edges of the water where the tiniest scraps of quote unquote, nature still appear, that you may be able to find something to eat and then move on.

[Water continues to sound against the bank. Airplanes continue to take-off and land nearby. Birds chirp all around.]

[7:34] Listening to this, you're able to get a sense of that energetic presence. So that sonic print isn't just a discrete survey of what types of vehicles are there, what kind of environment of concrete. You can hear the reverberations of these things. But really the emotional state matters like animal stress level, human stress level. It's the same. If we live in these environments and they're constantly spending time in that it puts undue stress in our bodies and it can really impact how we regulate ourselves. So finding the little pockets where we can hide away from the sounds of traffic or the sounds of planes. It's the same on both sides of the equation. Birds are famous for being able to have different bird calls to match the frequencies that are unoccupied within the landscape. And if you're constantly shouting over the noise, you can't actually survive there. You can't communicate. So you seek out the spaces where you can find that silence to be able to speak above everything else going on.

[An airplane passes loudly overhead and then crossfades to the “crackling” of leaves underfoot. Someone walks through a forested landscape.]

[8:57] In the summer of 2020, when I started this research, I took some of the most general Coyote maps of New York City where they had known to have breeding pairs for known coyote locations in Central Park near the Ramble, Queens at Railway Park, in Astoria near Rikers Island, and in the Bronx in Soundview and Ferry Point Park. And when I went to these parks, I could see that, yes, coyotes clearly can make a living here, but these landscapes were fractured and fragmented, especially small little parks like railway park. It's way too small to imagine, actually, a coyote sustaining itself off of that tiny little parcel of land. So I quickly came to realize that coyotes need so much more than just within the boundaries of the park. While I can learn a lot from walking around these areas and seeing for myself what the landscape and kind of waterways look like, I needed to get a new form of data to really see how far do these coyotes have to go to sustain themselves. Where are they eating? Where they hunting? Where they denning? How can they really draw upon a dispersed network of places to be able to make a territory? Luckily, I received GPS data from the nonprofit Gotham Coyote Project to be able to try to understand where coyotes were living in the Bronx and what some of their home territory looked like. Once they had the GPS data of coyotes, I would travel during the winter to these field sites to go look for current coyotes and their prints in the snow.

[The sounds of walking in the forest crossfade to the quiet hum of distant traffic. The dull quiet of an early morning soundscape enters your foregound. Snow “crunches” under heavy boots. A predator bird sounds close by. And storyteller, Jay Simpson, speaks softly into a stereo microphone: “The tracks I see. But this top layer that's been kicked is still really soft.”]

[11:23] And what was fascinating was taking a practice of wildlife tracking and blending it with ethnography. And as soon as I started to do that, I really needed to understand how sensory ethnography plays into that. When you're tracking animals, it's not just looking for, you know, the writing in the snow of where an animal was.

[The sound of crunching snow crossfades so the sound of crunching leaves. The season changes in Ferry Point Park.]

[11:47] You have to attune yourself to the entire environment around you to notice subtle differences of where a hill slope might guide a ridge line, or where water might kind of draw along the edge of a field.

[The sounds of waves and wind slowly enter your foreground. Wind “pops” against a microphone. Storyteller, Jay Simpson, speaks softly into a stereo microphone.]

[12:08] So now, take my little microphones, and let's see where we can place these to help bring you to this place and get more than just wind sounds. So I put one of these to the base of a piece of grass hoping that the water level stays high enough or low enough that this stays there. And another onto a place that's higher.

[Waves crash closely. Wind pops gently.]

[13:16] Walking is a very special research practice.

[13:19] I’m going to place these microphones on my pant leg.

[Friction—fabric against microphone. “Squealing,” “crunching,” and “popping” of walking along a coastal landscape.]

[14:11] As a researcher, I also didn't want to harass these animals to be able to make them a subject of my study. I considered myself much more along the lines of walking with these animals and trying to collaborate with them in a way to be able to walk alongside, to understand their territory.

[Gusts of wind blow against a microphone as storyteller, Jay Simpson, speaks into a stereo microphone.]

[14:32] So trying to kind of recenter perspectives into a space that's more collaborative and recognizes these other voices. Like, how can we pay attention to these things that otherwise... If I walk and I'm six feet tall and my head is always up above where my ears are, our attention gets gravitationally pulled towards these things. And it's harder to pay attention to how ground surface impacts our relationship to place with our understandings of what am I trying to learn? How am I relating to this environment? As I walk through the snow and I'm relying on footprints in the snow to be able to navigate behind these animals or following in the mud, I'm very attentive to what type of mud is this? How deep is it? How permanent is this? Are these tracks 5 minutes old? 5 hours old? All of these subtleties start to become apparent and actually really transform your literacy of making sense of this place.

[The wind subsides and crossfades to the noise of a distant airplane. Feet “crunch” leaves and sticks. Subtly, the high-pitched sounds of twigs “snapping” is replaced by other noise of footfalls against plastic, glass, and other debris and trash.]

[16:01] Our cities are built on years and decades of ruin, of toxins, of construction, waste just buried underground. And in following coyotes, I came to start to see all these places where heavy metals and dangerous gases exist within our landscapes that we think as greenery and parks. And they really speak to a legacy of the Anthropocene, of what it means to live in a toxic environment where humans have really altered the world around us to a place that is both complicated and dangerous, but also a place for renewal.

[16:44] What excites me most about coyotes returning to New York City? It's been their choice. No one brought coyotes here to try to reintroduce them. Coyotes came into New York City themselves. They're showing us how they thrive, how they make a living out of the rubble and forgotten corners of our city. And them, along with the weeds and other animals, are showing us a way we can survive in the Anthropocene.

[Coyotes “yelp” as someone walks across a littered landscape. Those sounds then fade to silence.]

[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]

[17:40] I do not recommend that people go and seek out coyotes in New York. Please don't. If you do see a coyote, you can visit the Gotham Coyote Project website and report a coyote sighting. These are still wild animals. And especially during winter and early spring they're denning, and you should leave them alone and give them a wide berth.

[18:01] The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to Gotham Coyote Project. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.

Terraformin' Drag

“Recycle, reuse, and reduce. And rein-in carbon on the loose. Pack your bags just in case. Prepare to go to outerspace!” While the health of our planet is concerning, inequities continue to pervade society today. In trying to build a world where all life can thrive, music, performance, and drag can serve as mediums through which systemic change can occur. 

In this episode, “Terraformin’ Drag,” Chris Goodrich (who performs in drag as Analee Fisher, @analeefisher), tells a story about his parody song “Terraformin’ Mars,” and how the political energy of drag can be important to environmental advocacy. Goodrich, in conversation with Cacophony Daniels (“The Belty Broad from Broadway,” @cacophonydaniels), discusses the history of drag, its current political spotlight, and the ways that queer voices and perspectives are crucial to shaping a better future. 

All proceeds from this episode will be donated to Housing Works, a healing community of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS who are dedicated to ending the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through relentless advocacy, the provision of lifesaving services, and supporting entrepreneurs.

Further Resources

@analeefisher

@cacophonydaniels

@paigeturnernyc

Everywhere is Queer

SAVE HER! the Environmental Drag Show

Terraformin' Mars

Episode Transcripts

[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[Audience applause. An orchestral introduction ensues. A drag queen addresses a late night audience.]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “Terraformin’ Drag” episode storyteller, Chris Goodrich, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[Muted strokes on a guitar designate a tempo, and then begin to strum an ostinato rhythm. Analee Fisher, a drag queen based out of New York City with Nashville roots, starts to sing a parody song. Eventually, electric bass and lead guitar join the country music texture.]

[00:44] If there's one thing you can learn from a drag queen: it's not that hard to make a few changes.

I don’t use straws when I sip my cold brew coffee

And when I’m done I make sure to use the cup

I volunteered at a garden siftin' compost

But that’s nothin’ next to corporations warmin’ this world up

Word got around that the truth is inconvenient

We struck accords all the way in Paris, France

But look at us now sayin' “well we didn’t mean it”

We didn’t save the planet, now we may just lose our chance

[1:24] Blame the corporations

Not your reputation

As some "eco savior"

Always watching your behavior

How ‘bout legislation

To improve our nation

If we don’t grab the handlebars,

Then we’ll be terraformin' Mars

[The ostinato of the rhythm guitar continues to strum in your background.]

[1:47] Being proactive about the health of the planet is ecological by nature, like taking steps to improve it. But a community that's had to be very proactive about their own health is LGBTQ plus. And so that consciousness and realizing that, like little intentional steps, planning and awareness can be huge as far as making people safer, happier and their lives better. It's these concrete actions, again, I think could inspire people to feel less of that hopelessness, to feel like I can take steps towards a goal. We can make progress as one.

[2:24] Today's storytellers are..

My name is Chris Goodrich and I perform in drag as Analee Fisher. You can find me on Instagram at Analee Fisher, A-N-A-L-E-E Fisher.

My name's Cacophony Daniels. I am a drag queen. I am the Belty Broad from Broadway.

[2:47] The original song is called Mama's Broken Heart, and it's performed by Miranda Lambert. When people are writing songs in like a musical sense, they can either start with the lyrics and then write music that fits those lyrics, or they can write all the music and then write lyrics to fit that. Well, when it's a parody, the music's already done for you, and they've even written out lyrics that syllabically work great with that music. So, one way I could do ii was by coming up with a title or an idea and then looking for a song that fit its title in the same number of syllables. Ma-ma's-Bro-ken-Heart. Ter-ra-for-min' Mars. And so I thought, "This could work." And I should get started at the beginning and change each line to be slightly different. And it all ended up making sense together!

[3:36] I wish that I could be a little less dramatic just like,

Hillary when the White House went to sh*t

We put the keys in that clunker we call Congress

Now the scientists can all agree but the government is split

Can’t pass a law without some right to left consensus

But compromise can be such a bitter pill

We can’t rely on those who can’t perform a census

While the oil lobby wants to wreck the Arctic with a drill

[4:09] Blame the corporations

Not your reputation

As some "eco savior"

Always watching your behavior

How ‘bout legislation

To improve our nation

If we don’t grab the handlebars,

Then we’ll be terraformin' Mars

[4:31] That's a great starting point, is that it's going to work logistically. But the other one is the feeling of the song and the feeling that the music can give you. Like righteous anger was what fueled a lot of this frustration. This sense that nothing can be done and rejecting that and fighting back. The feeling that you can't do anything to change the world or to change this country is crushing. It's difficult to accept thinking, "I'm so small, there's really nothing I can do." And sometimes that makes you decide to do nothing. There's a lot of emotions with the environmental debate, and especially now that we've known for a long time the problem and we've known possible solutions. And then there's all this resistance from every level. There's frustration and for some people, a bit of guilt or a feeling of hopelessness or shame. And I think the antidote to that feeling of negativity dragging you down can be something light, something funny, something colorful. And drag just might be a good prescription. People are tired of hearing the same old debate or the same call to action about the environment, if I can say it in the way that makes someone laugh, then they're thrown off a little bit and they're not defensive. They're not thinking around this conversation they've already had.

[5:52] Recycle, reuse, and reduce

And rein in carbon on the loose

Or pack your bags just in case, prepare to go to outer space

[Analee Fisher hangs on the final lyric, elongating the word “space.” The tune fades to silence, as the sounds of a street soundscape enter your foreground. Feet fall against the concrete making their “click-clacks” reverberate off the tall buildings nearby. People converse and whistle down the street, and a door hinge “squeaks” as someone walks into a bar. The street calm is replaced by audience applause and dialogue from performers.]

[6:24] Yeah, so good though. Pride—going to be here before you know it. Oh God, Pride! Who loves Pride out there? Make some noise if you love Pride! I hope it's not crazy... I mean I hope it's good crazy this year. Oh no, it's going to be good crazy, I think. It's good crazy. The places where we can actually still f***ing do it... Yeah ... are going to be amazing. Yes, it's going to be great. And all those people who are able, if you're watching online and you're in a place where you can't do drive, come to New York City and do Pride with us. We will treat you right. Don't we treat everyone right? Yes. It is so fun…

[The dialogue continues but fades into your background. The words from the performers become almost indiscernible.]

[6:51] I came to New York wanting to be involved in theater and performance, wanting to perform or saying or use what I learned some in school. And I didn't know how that would look. And not knowing where that's going is exciting. It can be fertile ground for something interesting to happen. Drag was a great way.

[7:13] Around 2019, I did my first show in a bar. It was in Queens, a bar called Albatross Astoria, and a drag queen named Cacophony Daniels,

[The voice of Cacophony Daniels enters your foreground briefly: “My name's Cacophony Daniels.”]

I think every year gives people an opportunity to do their first performance in front of an audience.

[The dialogue returns to your foreground momentarily as you hear the performers say, “... lime green wig. I know me! ...walk around drunk and they think they're in costume. I know... Hey Queen! Yeah! Hi, Honey! Hi!” Then, the voice of Cacophony Daniels enters your foreground. It’s clear, but not as cleanly recorded as the previous storyteller narrative. The acoustics of the space are different.]

[7:36] We are backstage at Hush Bar on a Monday night for Musical Mondays.

[The dialogue from the performers briefly returns to your foreground, as you hear Cacophony Daniels (from on stage) exclaim: “Well, everyone welcome to Musical Mondays!” The audience applauds. Then, the acoustics from backstage return and an interview-like dialogue begins between storytellers Chris Goodrich and Cacophony Daniels.]

[7:46] Chris Goodrich (CG): Well, we had met before actually. At Albatross, once.

Cacophony Daniels (CD): Yes!

CG: But after I recall back to 2019.

CD: Oh, my gosh. Pre-pandemic!

CG: Yes! You were so gracious to do a debut show for whoever wanted to sign up.

CD:Yes! Yes! Oh, I love the Drag Debutant Show!

CG: It was such a fun evening. And I'm still in contact with some of the people I met that night.

CD: Oh, amazing!

CG: But it makes me think of someone who didn't get that opportunity, if they weren't allowed to do that. And there was like aching inside of them, wondering "what if," how painful that can be.

CD: Yeah.

CG: But like, what would you say to someone today?

CD: Yeah?

CG: Who's going through that? Who doesn't get to be themselves in that way?

CD: Right.

CG: To do drag?

[The ambient sounds from backstage, alongside the sounds of the performance continues in your background. Dialogue, music, and audience blend as a single soundscape.]

[8:26] CD: Yeah. I mean, for the people out there who can't go out and perform in drag in front of people. I would say. I mean, first of all, on your own in your room is a great way to do it. Right. Live your fantasy, like, literally as a fantasy. But then I would say too, you know... Drag started as something that people did covertly. They did in their living rooms. They did at a party. They would throw a party and they would have it. It was a house party that no one knew about, and you'd black out the windows and you have that kind of party, right? The LGBTQ+ community, the Queer Community, has survived and thrived that way for literally centuries. It's sad that there are people who might have to go back to that at this point. But we will always be here. Even if you have to be slightly undercover, we will always be here. And I think what's most important is that people know that they are not alone, that there is always a community of people just like them, sometimes just around the corner and you wouldn't even know it.

[The soundscape from the performance returns to your foreground briefly as you hear more dialogue: “Thanks for coming out tonight. There's just nothing like live. I got asked from a host of Pride is happening, you know, there's still letting us performer for her. Yeah. So Pride, and they said, ‘Oh, you've done…’” Slowly, this dialogue fades into your background, as the original storyteller audio mix returns.]

[9:35] I'm from Nashville. Analee Fisher, that's my drag name. And I thought she would be inspired a lot by Broadway Divas, but also by Country Divas. Been really vocal recently about the problems in communities that celebrate country music on the one hand, but then are very exclusionary on the other. And so that contradiction doesn't have to exist, but it just does for a lot of people. I think the more we fight against that, the better that can be for a young person who's, you know, going to be confused, looking for a community. They'll see someone out there who is like them, even if they're in a small community of Tennessee and don't feel like that's in their immediate surrounding. It's out there somewhere. So hopefully that, for them, inspires hope and belonging.

[Your soundscape returns backstage at Hush bar on a Monday night. The interview-like dialogue between Chris Goodrich and Cacophony Daniels continues.]

[10:25] CG: I know for a fact that queen's in Nashville are going to keep going and keep performing.

CD: Absolutely. Absolutely. Not just Nashville, but, you know, Kentucky or wherever else it's happening. Right? Florida. All of those places have vibrant communities. Nashville has a vibrant gay community. There are so many queens there who are amazing, talented, storied queens who have been there for literal decades. Those people aren't going anywhere. Our community is not going anywhere. Drag is happening all over the world and in places where it can't happen. Where it's not allowed to happen. And if that has to be the way we do it for a while then that's what it'll be. But we're always here. I think protecting our brothers and sisters and non-binary family is all about being vocal, being present and being seen. If all of us are willing to speak up in a situation that might be uncomfortable to protect someone like that, who is, you know, always seen, who cannot "pass" as they walk around in society every day, I think that's the most important thing that we can do. Especially those of us who do pass, who can walk through society every day and not be clocked, right? It's important for us to stand up and say, you know, if someone is being bullied or abused or whatever, that whatever they're doing is not right and that we're here for them.

[The performance soundscape returns to your foreground briefly, as you hear Cacophony Daniels exclaim, “We do not care. Because we love you and you know that you are alive. So thank you so much.” Then, this soundscape fades into your background and the storyteller narrative audio mix continues.]

[11:49] A drag queen is asked to perform gender. That's usually the main goal, to poke fun at gender, sort of tear it apart in a way. We've seen how challenging it is for certain parts of the country to accept the gender norms are less rigid, less relevant today than maybe they used to be. And that's in every sector. And so breaking out of that rigid binary, that structure is so challenging for a lot of people. It shakes their foundation. It challenges their worldview and it makes them angry, or it makes them lash out. And so that's where a lot of the political fighting comes when it comes to drag, is that by wearing a dress, being born a man, I could be offending someone to their core without having said anything. They might not know anything about me, but that very act is shocking or challenging. The other thing about drag is that it's inherently political and radical and transgressive.

[The soundscape and dialogue from backstage return to your foreground.]

[12:49] CG: Is your drag political?

CD: All drag is political. I mean, especially now, right? Especially now, all drag is political. As much as I don't want to admit it, the temperature has changed even in New York.

CG: Normally, drag queens are called loud.

CD: Right? Especially me!

[Loud and raucous laughter ensues.]

[13:07] CG: But that's an asset, I'd say.

CD: Absolutely. And we have to be. We have to be loud. You know, drag queens and trans people have always been at the forefront of the queer movement because we are the most visible, right? Because we're the ones who pass the least. And so we have no choice but to be loud, but to speak up, but to be the squeaky wheel because we're out there anyway. So...

CG: I think that makes you a role model to a lot of young people, potentially.

CD: Thank you.

CG: And I think that's a good natural thing and part of the culture now. People look up to drag queens.

[13:42] CD: Yeah! You know, most drag shows happen in bars and happen late at night. So, you know, kids should A) be in bed and B) can't get in, 'cause it's a bar! right?! And that's what it's all about, right? So if you see a drag queen, tell a dirty joke or say an inappropriate thing, 99 times out of 100, it's going to be at a bar late at night where there are no kids because they're not allowed to legally be in there. Right? If a drag queen is hosting a drag queen story hour or is performing at a brunch in broad daylight on a Sunday at noon or whatever, then she's behaving very differently than a drag queen in a bar on a Saturday night at 11 p.m. or 1 a.m. or whatever that is. Just as everyone acts differently in different spaces, drag queens do too. We can read a room. Hello! We have to know how to read a room, that's how we survive. So we know when it's appropriate to say certain things and act certain ways and all of that kind of stuff. And then, of course, all of this B.S. about drag queens and transpeople and all of that is just a tactic.

CG: There are real things to be worried about.

CD: Absolutely!

CG: Real issues.

[14:44] CD: Yes, absolutely. Gun violence. Hello!? Banks collapsing. Hello!? And that's just, like, the things that happen today. There are so many more... the planet!? Hi! The planet that we're all living on!? Like that's all so much more important than whether or not there's a man walking around in a dress or a woman walking around with a, you know, mustache drawn on. Or a trans person using a bathroom, for God's sake. Like, none of that is important. None of that is a real issue. It's just a tactic to distract people from the real issues.

[The guitar from the parody song returns with its ostinato strumming. Both the soundscape of the performance and guitar strumming blend together in your background. Then, the storyteller narrative audio mix returns.]

[5:15] So I think that is a natural lead into how it can be ecological, environmental, because that's something we need. Is this political energy, this punk that drag brings up.

[The guitar strumming continues, but the backstage soundscape returns briefly. Cacophony Daniels passionately states:]

[15:28] Fuck yes, I'm political. Because it's important that our voices are heard. It's important that everyone in the country realize that the people who are making this noise about trans people, about drag, those people are the minuscule, minuscule minority, the hateful minority. But their hate is not what most people feel.

[The guitar strumming continues in the background as the storyteller narrative audio mix returns one, final time.]

[15:50] Being proactive about the health of the planet is ecological by nature, like taking steps to improve it. But a community that's had to be very proactive about their own health is LGBTQ+. And so that consciousness and realizing that like little intentional steps, planning and awareness can be huge as far as making people safer, happier and their lives better. It's these concrete actions, again, I think could inspire people to feel less that hopelessness. I feel like I can take steps towards a goal. We can make progress as one.

[The guitar fades into your foreground. A lead guitar strums an elongated chord. Analee Fisher begins to sing.]

[16:30] Recycle, reuse, and reduce

And rein in carbon on the loose

Or pack your bags just in case, prepare to go to outer space

[16:42] Blame the corporations

Not your reputation

As some "eco savior"

Always watching your behavior

How ‘bout legislation

To improve our nation

If we don’t grab the handlebars,

Then we’ll be terraformin' Mars

[The country band plays the final chords of the song and then fades to silence.]

[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]

[17:19] I think there's something inherent to humanity, to groups of people, that they want to come together in that way and affirm each other's beliefs and feel united. But definitely an important part of political discussion today is having a bit of an open mind when we come into a discussion. Are you ready?

[17:38] The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to Housing Works. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.

Slow Sewing

The process of making your own clothing takes time, patience, and care. And while it might seem overwhelming, it’s not as inaccessible as you might think! “The more people know what goes into a piece of clothing, the more people will stop undervaluing the cloth they put on their back.” So forget about fast fashion! How about slow sewing?

In this episode, “Slow Sewing,” Isabelle Levine (designer and owner of the DIY fashion brand, Forest and Thread) tells a story about the garment-making process, the fashion industry, and the environmental impacts of clothing production and consumption.

All proceeds from this episode will be donated to FABSCRAP, a textile reuse and recycle non-profit run out of Brooklyn.

Further Resources

The Environmental Cost of Fashion

Sew It Yourself, Daisy Braid

Zero Waste Patterns, Birgitta Helmersson

Seamwork

Forest and Thread

Episode Transcript

[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[A sewing machine “whirs” to life. Paper pages flip between fingers. A pencil glides along a metal ruler with a swift “ring.” An iron expels steam. Scissors cut fabric. All the sounds blend together as a single soundscape. These are sounds of clothing, sewing, and fashion creation.]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “Slow Sewing” episode storyteller, Isabelle Levine, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[A sewer adjusts a piece of fabric beneath the presser foot of a sewing machine. The needle mechanism swiftly moves up and down. Mechanical “grunts” and “clicks” integrate thread and fabric. A piece of clothing comes together.]

[00:46] Fashion production makes up 10% of humanity's carbon emissions. I want to offer people insight into the garment making process. It is slow. It is methodical. The more people know what goes into a piece of clothing, the more people will stop undervaluing the cloth they put on their back.

[1:08] Today's storyteller is...

Hi. My name is Isabelle Levine. I'm a designer and the owner behind the sustainable DIY fashion brand, Forest and Thread.

[The sounds of the sewing machine continue in your background.]

[1:28] I've been making my own clothes since I was nine years old. So for me, there is no such thing as not making my own clothes. I love the process. For me, the process is everything. I like to think about it from the very beginning.

[The sound of the sounding machine crescendos with a strong, “whir,” and then hard cuts to the sounds of fingers flipping pages of paper—as if someone is reading a book or magazine.]

[1:55] So if you're starting to make a garment, the first thing you have to think about is the concept for the garment. And that can be super conceptual or that can be a little bit more straightforward, like, “what function is it serving?”

[The sound of page-flipping continues in your background.]

[2:11] I'll reach for a book in my kind of inspiration phase. It can be gathering beautiful images, it can be gathering colors, it can be capturing a feeling that you want to try and achieve through the garment. And so you gather all of these inspiration images and you'll probably put them into some sort of mood board.

[The sound of page flipping slowly cross fades to the sound of a “clicking” of a computer keyboard and mouse. Someone peruses websites and organizes their ideas using a digital app.]

Or maybe you fill your sketchbook with a bunch of printouts, or maybe it's just, you know, even a Pinterest board or some sort of online system where you're just collecting your images and keeping them all together.

[The sound of page-flipping returns and blends with the noise of computer clicking and typing.]

[2:51] Such a big part of my garment making process is really thinking about the concept, thinking about the function, making sure that every single garment that you're making really serves a purpose. It's not going to be thrown away in two weeks because you no longer need it. You need to make garments that are meant to last. You need to make garments that are going to be worn many, many times and that you love so much that you want to repair them and mend them and wear them forever and ever and ever. That's the goal. That's the ultimate goal.

[The sounds of page-flipping and computer “clacking” slowly crossfade to sketching noises. A pencil grinds against paper—the friction-like sound of ideas given form. Sometimes, an eraser “rubs” against the paper.]

[3:29] Once you've nailed that idea down, you can start doing a bunch of sketches. Some people are maybe not that sketch oriented, so maybe they choose to just drape a bunch of ideas. Maybe you're like, I like this portion of the sketch, but I want to try a different color on the shirt. And so you'll sketch again and you'll switch out the color and choose a different color. Or, you know, you're sketching your jacket and you want to try out different pocket placement, so you start sketching all the different pocket placement options. So you can do however many sketches you need until you're like, okay, that's the one. So you have your front, your back, your side, you have the overall silhouette in place. You really know what you're going for at this point.

[The sketching noises slowly crossfade to a metal ruler “thudding” against a table. A pencil occasionally glides along the ruler with a high-pitched “ring.” Paper subtly “crinkles” under the weight of the ruler and glide of the pencil.]

[4:29] Once you've nailed down your design, then you can start your pattern making phase. And so pattern making can be done either by flat patterning or by draping. So if you're doing flat patterning, then you're going to be using measurements. You're going to be using systems that people have been using for centuries. Truthfully, not that much has changed. These methods for coming up with that shape have been in place for a really long time. So these are things that if you are trying to achieve a garment that exists in the world already, like a pant or a jacket or a button down shirt. These are things that you can you can research how to draft that, that's something that exists in the world. You take your own measurements and you create the shape on flat paper.

[The sound of the ruler, pencil, and paper suddenly cut to the sound of scissors cutting paper. The paper “crunches” with each opening and closing of the scissor blades. The paper begins to slice smoothly, as the sewer pushes the scissors forward along their cutting lines.]

[5:33] Once your flat pattern is ready, you cut it all out and you place that on top of your fabric. Typically, you're going to make a toile, or some people call it a muslin, which is basically a really inexpensive cotton fabric that many designers use as their first test for a pattern. And that is basically a prototype.

[The paper cutting ends and is replaced by the “rip-rip” of tape. The sewer begins to tape pieces of cut paper together, which provide a guide for their toile. Scissors, paper crinkling, and taping blend together.]

[6:07] Most times your first pattern, your first draft of a garment is not going to be right. Most times you're going to want to edit it a little bit. And so from there you go back to your pattern making phase and you edit your paper pattern. Then you can probably cut straight into your real fabric.

[There is a slow crossfade to small “popping” or “clicking” sounds. Small metal pins rest safely in a tiny container. They “click” as the sewer retrieves one, which then “pops” as it punctures a piece of fabric. Fabric, paper, pins, and tape jumble together as a mixture of haptic noise.]

[6:35] So your real fabric is the fabric that you would envision the final garment being in. And so then you'll lay your real fabric down on your table, and then you'll put your paper pattern on top of that. You can either pin the paper pattern to the fabric, or you can put weights down and use a rotary cutter and cut around your your shapes and cut out the fabric.

[Scissors slowly cut through fabric. The pitch is much deeper, and the timbre more “choppier,” than the previous sound of scissors cutting paper.]

[7:03] I love the sound of cutting fabric.

[Scissors continue to cut fabric with slow precision.]

[7:23] You know, you use your fabric scissors for cutting fabric. You do not use them for anything else. It will dull the blade. And so a fabric scissor, it has like a very specific weight to it. And it just makes such a nice sound when you cut all the way through the fabric.

[The scissors finally finish their job with a swift and satisfying “chop!” And immediately the “whir” of a sewing machine enters your foreground.]

[7:47] Once you cut your real fabric, then the sewing process starts. Sewing is methodical. There's a system in which you put a garment together. I am obsessed with French Seams. It's a type of seam finish. It encloses all of the raw edges of your fabric so that they're perfectly hidden. And it's a very strong seam. So it has two stitch lines. And basically when you're selling a French Seam,

[The sounds of a sewing machine, scissors cutting fabric, and an iron steaming and heating a piece of cloth resonate in unison with the storyteller’s description: “you sew two layers of fabric together. You trim the seam allowance down. You go to the iron.” This cycle of sounds continues in a repetitive, almost meditative-like sequence.]

you sew two layers of fabric together. You trim the seam allowance down. You go to the iron. You iron the seam allowance in one direction. You flip your fabric so that the seam is now on the edge. And then you go sew another seam. And then you go back to the ironing board and you press the seam in one direction. And it's kind of this nice rhythm: sew, cut, press, sew, cut press, sew, cut, press. And it's just this repetition. It's very meditative.

[Finally, the sequence of noises ends as an iron glides upon cloth. It moves across your field of listening, from left to right, “sighing” puffs of steam into a wrinkled garment.]

[9:21] So once you finish sewing your garment, you're going to give it a nice press all over.

[The iron continues in your foreground. After a moment, you can hear a zipper slowly glide up and down a garment.]

[9:31] And then you're going to wear it and love it. Then you're going to wash it and wear it again. And once there's a hole in it, you're going to mend it and wear it again. So, yeah, it goes on forever after that.

[The zipper sounds out a swift “zip,” followed by a hard cut to silence. Soon the acoustics of a small room enter your foreground. You hear the flapping of loose fabric and then the “clicks,” “pops,” and “beeps” of a washing machine. Someone places a garment in the machine to wash.]

[9:43] Fashion production makes up 10% of humanity's carbon emissions. The way we currently consume fashion results in huge amounts of textile waste, which is either incinerated or ends up in landfills or even is exported to developing countries. Many of the manmade fibers have terrible environmental impact. Polyester is a plastic made from fossil fuels and is used for about 65% of all clothing. Every time we wash our clothes, microplastics shed into our wastewater system and work their way through the wastewater treatment plants. Microplastics end up in our natural waterways and in the atmosphere. We know they're harmful to marine life and birds, but we still don't even know the human health risks of this yet.

[Detergent is placed in the machine. The detergent door closes with a swift, “thud.” The washing machine door locks with a “ping!” And the low-rumble of the machine begins to incorporate water and cloth.]

[10:39] It feels like every time someone comes up with a fabric that is "sustainable," there's more research that comes out saying it is actually not that great. For instance, rayon and viscose were going to be these great alternatives for polyester because they are made from wood pulp, which means they are biodegradable. But then, in actuality, because they are made of wood pulp, this means that it contributes to deforestation. So it's like you get one thing, but you sacrifice another thing. Right now whether people intended this to happen or not, fashion trends and the desire to consume more and more clothing is causing huge amounts of damage to the earth we live on and not to mention the people who inhabit it.

[The washing machine momentarily pauses its rumble to empty a dose of water and pressurized air. Then continues to macerate clothes, water, and suds with renewed vigor.]

[11:36] While I think part of the reason may be the pursuit of beauty in the sense that people strive to look a certain way and clothing can help achieve that look. I think most of the time what these situations come down to is corporate greed. Companies have the greatest responsibility to change their actions. If fast fashion companies weren't generating this constant desire to consume by producing new clothes and marketing them every day, then the consumer would have nothing to buy. The balance needs to be fixed between our desires for money or consumer goods and our desire for a healthy planet. We have to keep searching for ways to connect people directly to the environmental impact their consumption habits generate. And in addition to just connect consumers to these environmental issues, we desperately need to hold corporate companies responsible. Unfortunately, there is not one solution. There's not even just one problem. Many people from many areas of the industry and general public need to demand changes and act on them.

[A sewing machine “whirs” to life as the rumble of the washing machine fades to silence. Scissors begin to cut fabric. A pencil slides across paper. Another one glides along a metal ruler. Pins “pop,” and paper “crinkles.” An iron releases a puff of steam. All the sounds from throughout the episode begin to blend together.]

[13:15] I make my own clothes because it makes me happy and it gives me purpose. Clothing is an indispensable part of daily ritual, culture, and self-expression. Fashion is not going anywhere, but we can play our part in trying to leave the world better than how we found it, simply by being mindful of how we produce and consume clothing. People relate to things that are familiar. People care about things that are personal to them. I want to offer people insight into the garment making process. It is slow. It is methodical. The more people know what goes into a piece of clothing, the more people will stop undervaluing the cloth they put on their back.

[The sounds cut to silence with one final “puff” of steam from the iron.]

[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]

[14:14] Our mission is to bring new garments into the world in the most environmentally friendly, humanely, and sustainably minded way, as possible. If you're interested in learning more about Forest and Thread or you want to dive a little bit deeper into the garment making process, you can check out our website at forestandthread.com or you can head to my Instagram page at forest.and.thread.

[14:41] The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to FabScrap. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.

The Ecological City

The Ecological City—Procession for Climate Solutions (currently in its sixth year) is a pageant event that happens across multiple sites in Lower Manhattan. Through music, dance, poetry, processionals, visual art, puppetry, and speech, The Ecological City highlights the importance of green and natural spaces in the city as urban climate solutions.

In this episode, “The Ecological City,” Felicia Young (social action artist and founder of Earth Celebrations) tells a story about her inspiration for social and environmental activism, the development of the Lower East Side community gardens, and the 2023 Ecological City processional. As you listen to street bands, music performances, puppet making, and other sounds from this year’s Ecological City event, you can hear how the arts are vital to effecting social and environmental change.

All proceeds from this episode will be donated to Earth Celebrations, a non-profit organization on the Lower East Side that engages communities to generate environmental and social change through the arts.

Further Resources

The Center for Artistic Activism, Felicia Young

Pageantry as Climate Activism

PlacemakingX

Esther Crow

Allison Spann

Sea Dance Collective

Nicole Peyrafitte

Elsa Nilsson

Michelle Thompson

Sixth Street Youth Program

Episode Transcript

[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[An intense rhythmic pattern sounds out at sticks hit a drum. People shout as a parade moves down the street. A speaker addresses a crowd: “Due to global warming…” The sounds of a street procession, several musical performances, and poetry readings begin to blend together.]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “The Ecological City” episode storyteller, Felicia Young, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[A flutist performs a slow, legato melody. Wind blows through the branches of trees and photography cameras “flicker” and “click” as they capture images. A crowd listens quietly. Art sounds throughout the streets of New York City.

[00:56] So the current Ecological City Procession for Climate Solutions is a project now in its sixth year. It involves recognition of the value of the community gardens that we help preserve as urban climate solutions.

[1:11] Today's storyteller is...

Felicia Young. I'm the founder and director of Earth Celebrations—a nonprofit organization applying the arts to build community, collaboration, and action on environmental challenges.

[The musical performance continues as the flute melody reaches a high register.]

[1:35] I lived in New York City, that's where I grew up. In high school, I interned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was 16, training 11 year olds to give tours to eight year olds in the African, Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. I started recognizing that the masks and the costumes were not really meant to be seen within the context of a museum or gallery space. They were part of socially functional ceremonies that had a purpose. And in a lot of times there was a lot of community engagement and collaboration in those ceremonies. And then in college, I studied art history and came across these theatrical pageants of the artist Jacques-Louis David, known as a neoclassical painter who, while doing portraits of Napoleon, was also organizing pageants for the French Revolution in the streets. So I became very interested in the idea of the artist not alone in a studio, but the artist who went out into the streets.

[A percussionist enthusiastically strikes a membranophone as an ensemble of drummers responds to the call. Rhythmic grooves lead a processional.]

[3:13] Back in New York City, I got my first job at the Alternative Museum, which was a sociopolitical art museum in Tribeca, founded in 1974. And even though we were doing important political shows about issues, there were only other artists coming to these exhibitions. And I at a certain point realized, well, we're talking about the issues, but we're communicating to a very small, insular group of art educated people. And I just felt that was limited impact. So I said, "That's it. I'm just going to go out into my own community and look around." And at that time, there was over 60 community gardens. So this is back in 1990.

[The energy of the Samba ensemble slowly crossfades to the sounds of birds “chirping.” Cars pass in the distance and people chat nearby. The soundscape of Tompkins Square Park enters your foreground.]

[4:04] East of Avenue looked like a war zone—abandoned buildings, vacant lots with huts and left over car parts. There were dead bodies found in them. They were havens for drug dealings and prostitution. I mean, it was... today you would not imagine the way it looked. The city pulled out resources from these neighborhoods in the seventies and it was left to decay. And it was the low income people without money who finally said, we've had enough of the crime, enough the drugs. We're going to clean out the rubble, we're going to plant gardens and we're going to improve the neighborhood for ourselves. So this is a completely grassroots initiative done out of city neglect, which is completely different than a top down approach. And after 25 years, so by the time I got involved in 1990, the gardens had already existed for about nearly 20 years.

[The sounds of Tompkins Square Park crossfade to the ambient sounds of a community garden in the Lower East Side. A speaker addresses a crowd.]

[5:05] ... gardens to people. And this garden, like many in the East Village, was started in the seventies when this was a rough neighborhood. But there were a lot of abandoned plots and people said, "You know what? Let's do something about them and not let them go for waste." And I love the recycling theme that you have going on here. I think that's a message that can't be brought across often enough. This nature only survives with us in it because we are here on this planet, but we need to treat it. And I didn't even know….

[The sounds of the speaker crossfade as the soundscape of Tompkins Square Park returns to your foreground.]

[5:38] And if you looked at sort of the economy, you know, '87 was a crash and so things slowed down. But by 1990, things started picking up again and developers were beginning to look around the Lower East Side to develop those sites. The city's maps had only listed community gardens as blighted vacant lots. They were not listed as gardens that had been cultivated with trees, flowers, butterflies and community programing, all given free to the low income community.

[The soundscape of Tompkins Square Park subtlety crossfades to the sounds of photography cameras “clicking” and a speaker addressing a crowd. The speaker is almost indiscernible, but the phrase “...write at the form that you get for families…” is distinct. There are families and children present at the gathering.]

[6:21] I realized, well, that's what I can do. I'll create a pageant. That'll be one way of telling the community's story.

[The speaker returns to your foreground momentarily as your hear the prase, “… and we're going to do a fun little educational, jazzy number called ‘Bees, Beavers, and Bats’…”]

[6:33] We went to nearly 40 gardens from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.. This was really a devotional pilgrimage because people cared and people wanted to participate.

[The speaker fades to silence as the sounds of people quietly chattering enter your foreground. Papers “crinkle” and pins “pop” as a giant paper mache puppet takes form. An eraser rubs with intense friction against a canvas. Paint brushes “dust” a thick layer of paint on construction paper. A community works together to create pageantry artwork.]

[6:50] We'd create visual art. We'd create giant puppets and costumes representing the different spirits of the gardens. And over the course of the day would tell a story about the struggle of the gardens versus development and how the community would save the garden. So we projected the storyline that we would be victorious.

[The sounds of community art-making quickly crossfade to the sounds of a hushed audience. Two viewers casual chat before quieting their conversation. Photography cameras “click” and “snap” as onlookers excitedly observe the children actor who prepare to take the stage in a small performance. A youthful narrator begins the play.]

[7:22] “Once upon a time in a neighborhood not so far from here, a local park flourished near the East River, housing hundreds of species of insects, birds, and mammals and providing a shady and luscious green space for children and adults to live and play. The park was enjoyed by neighbors and shared by the human and animal community. One day, a dark and deadly storm named Hurricane Sandy swept through New York City…”

[The play and narration fades, but continues in your background.]

[7:41] Even though we were up against Giuliani and the biggest development interests in New York, I figured if we built a movement, we'd certainly save some along the way.

[The conclusion of the play and narration returns to your foreground as “cheers” and “yells” ring out from performers and audience alike.]

[7:53] “…In the end, the East River community has defended their home through protest. The bad guys may have had money and the big yellow monster. But the animals had resistance, community, and love, which allowed them to take back their land and say no to corporate greed.”

[The sounds of cheering quickly crossfade to a brass band playing energetic processional music.]

[8:11] Even on the history of the Lower East Side, there was an American pageant movement in the early 1900s. So Henry Street Settlement, University settlement, they used the pageant form as a way of bringing together all the new immigrant population and redefining the new America. There were social reform pageants. There were protest pageants with factory workers. It seemed to be the perfect form for communicating in the streets and with a diverse population, and facilitating the telling of a community's struggle. And not just telling of a story and saying, "Well, that's it." But you're actually creating and mobilizing an action, and building a movement over time that can actually impact policy.

[The brass band slowly crossfades to the strumming of a guitar. A singer addresses an audience: “How does that sound? Is that good on volume?” The musician prepares to perform a song in a community garden. The soundscape enters your background.]

So within the first year we had several thousand people who were part of it, and immediately people automatically started talking about what role they wanted to play the next year.

[The musician briefly returns to your foreground as you hear the beginning of a musical phrase: “…Bees, Beavers, and Bats all help the environment!” The song performance continues in your background.]

[9:18] We'd been doing these pageants, but we also formed this Lower East Side Garden Preservation Coalition out of it, and that became the New York City Coalition for the Preservation of Gardens. So it grew from being this Lower East Side thing, that had been going on for five or six years, to all of a sudden being a citywide movement representing people throughout New York City.

[The singer momentarily returns to your foreground as your hear the lyrics: “Bees, Beavers, and Bats…”]

[9:44] I call this cultural organizing. A lot of people might call it creative placemaking. But it's applying the arts, music, dance, theater, visual art and poetry to build community, collaboration, and action on environmental challenges in New York City, and also applying that to other ecological challenges around the world.

[Lyrics surface to your foreground briefly as the tune continues: “...important creatures with many features!”]

[10:15] You have to start with the place. What's happening on the Lower East Side? Or what's happening on the Hudson River? If it's a crisis or a challenge that people care about or need to know about and will care about, you need to start with that. And then it builds. But it has to be a common story because it's tangible and it's local and it's in their neighborhood. It's not just a storyline that's floating out in the universe.

[An instrumental interlude occurs as brass instruments and a kazoo assume the lead melodic voice. The song continues in your background.]

[10:51] That's where the current project comes in—Ecological City Art and Climate Solutions Project. Because, you know, all those years we thought we were preserving open space. We weren't really thinking that we were preserving urban climate solutions.

[The musical performance crossfades to the sounds of birds chirping, traffic flow, and a microphone with ample gain. A poet addresses an audience.]

[11:05] “Hi, Happy Earth Celebration Day. I'm Marsha Eufield and I'm honored to read two poems. This one is called, ‘Letter to a Solitary New York City Tree.’

Dear Tree, Companion of our loneliness. How do you survive out there inside a fence that doesn't have your name? Steps away from the nearest green? I know you're busy cooling the city, cleaning the air, giving us oxygen, helping us breathe. We share the sun, the moon, the stars and the night. Though with the street lights you hardly have enough dark to sleep, which is probably why your suburban cousins outlive you. Yet you survive and thrive in the time you have. Let us learn from you. Notice how you reach out from nearby branches, sway in June, and welcome birds and blossoms. Let us, in particular, note how you support your roots as they break through every obstacle to emerge, no matter how gnarled and convoluted. Let us learn.

[A musical drone enters your background. A high-pitched melismatic voice sings over the drone. Another artistic performance as part of The Ecological City Procession for Climate Solutions begins.]

[12:22] So the current Ecological City Procession for Climate Solutions is a project now in its sixth year. It involves recognition of the value of the community gardens that we helped preserve as urban climate solutions, and to bring together these solutions not only within the community gardens, but the neighborhood, as well as what was happening on the waterfront. So we identified 21 sites, each with its own unique climate solution. So it's a whole ecosystem model of sustainability within the Lower East Side.

[The drone and voice crossfade to the sounds of a hushed audience, birds chirping, distant traffic noise, and cameras snapping photos. A speaker addresses a large group of onlookers.]

[12:55] “Due to global warming, pollution, and public buffering, rising seas and impacts of climate change. Our gardens that offer urban climate still remain threatened with destruction by development plan. Let us sing and dance and make offerings of peace and love. Offerings that will joyously affirm a sustainable future for all. It may just be a matter of life and death, pax vobiscum, peace be with you.”

[Applause, which then quickly crossfades to the sound of a low drone. Long sustained chords begin to overlap and blend. Later, “clacking” of earthy windchime-like instruments join the texture. Another performance as part of The Ecological City begins.]

[13:30] So the pageant takes place throughout those 21 sites. We're currently running workshops creating giant puppets and visual art and performances, all created with community participation and over 50 community partners. It takes place throughout the 21 sites over 5 hours, ten miles long. Sites include rooftop bee farms and a green roof. Then over to the waterfront, where we address sea level rise and coastal resiliency redevelopment plans. A central ceremony where we enable each of the stakeholders of those particular sites to say a few words about that particular climate solutions. So it's another very tangible way that people, they may walk past a garden, they may say, "Oh, I see the trees," but they don't realize that that is a pollinator garden or there are bio swells in this garden that are filtering pollutants from going in to the river or a water harvesting pond where permeable pathways that help absorb water. And of course the role of carbon sequestration for plants and soil absorbing carbon and filtering pollutants from the air. Tangible solutions that we don't to say, "Oh, we imagine these solutions in the future." They're happening, they're all around, they're in your neighborhood and, you know, you can recognize them. And also see their importance by bringing them together as a cohesive ecosystem that's community cultivated.

[The drone, chords, and windchimes fade as the sound of applause enters your foreground. A speaker addresses a group of onlookers.]

[15:08] “Every year we participate in Ecological City and it's a really fantastic celebration of our community, as well as the ecological solutions that all of us are working so hard for. So without further ado, because I know we have a lot…”

[The drone and chords return to your background.]

[15:21] That kind of resource sharing and collaboration, I think that's so important even when you're talking about the climate crisis and people living in silos and not bringing their different expertise to confront an issue. Here we're doing it in this sort of, you know, very small community way, but everybody has something to offer and can help make this big thing happen.

[The drone and chords crossfade to the opening soundscape of this episode: a flutist performs a slow, legato melody. Wind blows through the branches of trees and photography cameras “flicker” and “click” as they capture images. A crowd listens quietly. Art sounds throughout the streets of New York City.]

[15:56] They don't want to feel helpless and they want to feel positive and what can they do? And I think this project makes them understand that there are some very tangible ways that you can reach out in your community. Sometimes it feels overwhelming if you just think about it as a global crisis and it's too big to deal with, it's too big—what difference can I make? And then you just bring it back home. It's like, okay, we live here. These are our neighbors. These are people. These are our community centers and our schools. And we're just going to take this huge problem and we're just going to look at it within our own neighborhood and tell its story. And so it's the local story, but of a much bigger global challenge.

[Other sounds from the episode—a samba procession, low drones, melismatic singing, guitar strumming, brass bands, whistles, yelling and cheering, poetry readings, orators addressing audiences—begin to blend with the sounds of the flute performance.]

[16:52] I think art becomes a safe zone. It's a place where people can experiment with ideas. It's sort of an imaginary world, and you create this communal experience of what you want to project or create or a narrative and a storyline. But everyone's experience together in real life, not on a stage, not in theater, but out in their neighborhood. And there's something that then goes on beyond, okay, the pageant's over. But somehow there's been some change. The community itself is slightly different because it's created this thing together. It's built it together. And whatever that story is that everyone helped co-create somehow lingers on afterwards. So it doesn't end when the pageant's over.

[An audience applauds and their soundscape fades to silence.]

[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]

[17:55] The arts has a really important role to play in our ability to communicate not just the climate crisis, but how we can actually make things change in for the better. And I feel that the arts is the one place where people are creating something and they're putting forward new ideas so you don't have to just reflect the world as you see it. You can also imagine the world you want to create and you can put that out there in real time in the world through all of these arts. And that's where I feel that bridging of where we are today and where we want to be. And the arts provides a bridge.

The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to Earth Celebrations. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.

Superfund Waterways

A superfund site is a location containing abandoned hazardous pollutants that often require remediation. By contrast, the sounds of these locations can seem rather peaceful, beautiful, or serene. 

In this episode, “Superfund Waterways,” Danielle Butler and ND Austin (co-founders of the Tideland Institute), and Jeremy S. Bloom (sound artist) tell a story about the New York Harbor, the possibilities of an NYC water culture, and the extent to which soundscapes can alter our perception of environmental change. As part of this narrative, you will be able to hear excerpts from the collaborative project, The Soothing Sounds of the Superfund Sites—a three volume album that features recordings from six different superfund locations along New York City waterways. The tension between the soothing sound of a site and the description of its hazardous material creates an interesting dialogue between water and urban culture.

All proceeds from this episode will be donated to the Tideland Institute, a collective that connects New Yorkers to their harbor by building on-water opportunities for physical access, celebration, and creative engagement. 

Further Resources

Jeremy S. Bloom

Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club

Episode Transcript

[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[Ocean waves crash against land. A stream trickles. Moving water bubbles against an underwater microphone. All the sounds begin to blend and overlap. ]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “Superfund Waterways” episode storyteller, Jeremy S. Bloom, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[Ocean waves bubble and pulse against an underwater microphone. Stagnant lulls are interspersed by intense pressure as water collides with land—constantly pushing and pulling against the microphone. A voice begins the episode story.]

[00:56] Intense, constant churning of waves upon land. And you get kind of caught into that, like that rhythm and that slow grind; the grinding away of like water on land. And then you become aware that you're in the city.

[As the pressure of another incoming wave approaches, the microphone is pulled from the watery depths. A clear soundscape of Coney Island Beach enters your foreground. Waves continue to crash against land as seagulls call out and wind whips against the microphone filter.]

[1:35] And that is New York, that conversation between water and urban culture.

[The soundscape of Coney Island Beach crossfades to that of Pebble Beach in Brooklyn. An elevated subway passes overhead with rattling and roar. Waves lap against the shoreline. A second, different voice elaborates on the episode story.]

[2:15] The waves on the pebbles has the same kind of roar, the ebb and flow, of dark, heavy rumbling sound, as this elevated subway passing overhead.

[The subway and water resonate as a third, different voice continues the episode story.]

[2:26] And they're kind of functioning together and playing a similar role, even though one is organic and of nature and one is of technology. They sound sort of the same world to me.

[The third voice continues.]

[2:41] So the project's called Soothing Sounds of Superfund Sites. Basically, what's going on on these albums is we're going to the most disturbed, the most polluted, the most dirty, the most downtrodden spaces around New York harbor. And we're inviting people to engage with those spaces through a different sense.

[The second voice elaborates.]

[3:02] No matter what it smells like, no matter what it looks like, no matter whether it's been remediated yet or not. The sound of a Superfund site is rain on pebbles. It's birds chirping. It's wind in grass.

[The first voice closes the section.]

[3:18] That was kind of our way to take a story that is really complex and overwhelming and give you an access point.

[3:30] Today's storytellers are...

ND Austin (NDA), Co-founder of the Tideland Institute.

My name is Daniel Isidora Butler (DB). I'm co-founder of the Tideland Institute.

My name's Jeremy S. Bloom (JB) and I'm a sound designer based in New York City.

[The Pebble Beach soundscape returns to your foreground.]

[3:56] (ND) And in New York, we have this crazy, historic sound inversion where it used to be, let's say 100 years ago, all of the noise was on the water and none of the noise was on the streets.

[The Pebble Beach soundscape crossfades to water churning. The engines of the Staten Island Ferry propel the vessel with a deep rumbling and splashing of water.]

[4:08] (ND) All the newspaper articles in the late 1800s about noise in New York are all complaints about sound from the water. And that is an entire armada of every single tug boat, ferry boat, everything blowing a whistle, blowing a horn, communicating by whistles and horns. And this is before the invention of modern radio. Once radio was invented, all the boats talk over the radio. No one signals significantly by blowing their horns. Still a little bit of that left today. Every time the Staten Island ferry departs, it blasts its horn.

[The sounds of roaring engine and churning water fade to silence as the Staten Island Ferry loudly sounds its horn.]

(ND) That is an actual, that's a historic signal indicating it's about to back up out of its slip. So there's still a few little pieces of that left today, but mostly the sound on the water has completely disappeared.

[The sound of horn and churning water blend and crescendo before a hard cut to silence. This occurs in union with the storyteller as they say the word “disappeared.” Then, the soft lull of waves against the shore enter your foreground. People chat and birds chirp. Wind softly “pops” against a microphone filter. This is the East Riverwalk soundscape.]

[5:01] (DB) I would say that we're we're pretty estranged from the water and we're really curious to know how New York would be different if we allowed the culture and the vibrancy of the city to extend to the edges and onto the water.

[5:20] (ND) New York Harbor is not just one type of waterway. There's the Hudson River, which is a swift flowing river. There's the East River, which is not a river at all. It's a tidal estuary. There's canals. There's narrow hidden pockety, very calm portions. There's rough, wild, crazy portions. There's parts of the harbor that are full of industrial traffic. There's parts of the harbor that are actually really calm and protected. And in every different place, there's different ways of interacting with the water there. So it's not like there's only one thing that can happen in any one place.

[5:55] (DB) And doing it through culture creation and social infrastructure and just recognizing that we have this great asset.

[The East Riverwalk soundscape continues in your background. A boat horn sounds in the distance.]

[6:04] (JB) When we were working on the Soothing Sounds of Superfund Sites project, the real challenge was curatorial. And that's all about avoiding and accounting for noise pollution of other elements that would otherwise not be there.

[A horn sounds. Birds chirp. Waves, created from boat wake, lap against the shoreline nearby.]

[6:27] (JB) So the project is called, Soothing Sounds of Superfund Sites. Basically what's going on on these albums is we're going to the most disturbed, the most polluted, the most dirty, the most downtrodden spaces around New York harbor. And we're inviting people to engage with those spaces through a different sense. If they briefly divorce the visual aspects of that space and listen to them through the sound experience, they're struck by the beauty of these places. And then that works in contrast to a very brief textual description in the liner notes that is maybe more aligned with some of the conventional descriptions of these places. And that tension creates a really interesting moment of discovery for people, a really interesting moment of kind of thwarting their expectations. And for every person who listens, that happens in a different way.

[7:28] (ND) So if you've never been to a Superfund site, whatever it is that you imagine that super toxic place might be like, you might be surprised to discover that no matter what it smells like, no matter what it looks like, no matter whether it's been remediated yet or not, the sound of a Superfund site is rain on pebbles. It's birds chirping. It's wind and grass.

[7:53] (JB) It's nature. You're in nature…

[A hard cut to silence, followed by a slow fade into the first track of Soothing Sounds of Superfund Sites.]

(JB) and the nature is disturbed. But still, nature.

[8:02] (JB) Volume One: Dumps.

Side A: Fresh Kills Landfill (Track 1)

[The audio for this section of the episode is best captured by the descriptions curated by the storytellers themselves. Please follow the story narrative and text below. The audio of each track fades into your background during the liner note readings, and then transitions into the next track. All liner notes are read by storyteller, Jeremy S. Bloom.]

[9:14] Once the largest landfill in the world, this giant heap of New York City trash is slowly being rehabilitated into a heap shaped park. Orange tinted leachate gently flows down a rocky ditch underscored by songbirds and laughing gulls.

[9:34] Side B: Horseshoe Road Drum Dump (Track 2)

[10:37] At the site, toxic waste processors abandoned "tar like piles, dioxin laced ash, and pesticide drums that oozed unknown gelatinous substances." For many years, the EPA monitored a "purple puddle," ultimately concluding that despite extensive analysis, it is impossible to determine the chemical specific nature of the material that makes the puddle purple. Thriving songbirds chirp over the persistent hum of a distant highway as light rain falls on remediated foliage.

[11:18] Volume Two: Oil

Side A: Greenpoint Oil Spill Groundwater Well Pump (Track 3)

[12:23] Dozens of active oil wells are currently removing spilled oil from beneath Brooklyn. Since the late 1970s, more than 13 million gallons have been recovered and sent to a refinery to be made into gasoline. An oil pump hums with a deep undulation.

[12:43] Side B: Newtown Creek Groundwater Treatment Outfall (Track 4)

[13:46] After the spilled oil is extracted, the remaining water is reintroduced into Newtown Creek through this pipe, becoming the cleanest source of water entering the creek. Crystal clean water rushes through riprap onto the waterway below.

[14:04] Volume Three: Waste.

Side A: Marine Garbage Transfer Station (Track 5)

[15:10] Because New York City is an archipelago, much of its waste ultimately exits via barge. Recycled metals, garbage, and poop sludge. A retired Marine transfer station rests in tranquility as a distant mechanical claw shifts scrap metal from land to barge in gently crashing Sisyphean cycles.

[15:33] Side B: Queens Broadway Combined Sewer Outfall (Track 6)

[16:37] The most active polluter in New York City remains the city itself, annually and illegally, dumping 27 billion gallons of raw sewage into New York Harbor. Drips echo within the depths of a concrete sewer tunnel, interrupted by the occasional resonant slosh of a passing ferry wake.

[An airplane passes overhead. Waves “plop” against stone. The East Riverwalk soundscape returns to your foreground.]

[17:07] (DB) We loved the idea of superfund sounds being really relaxing and soothing. That was kind of our way to take a story that is really complex and overwhelming and give you an access point and never being prescriptive about what people are learning or should feel. And so that's what relationship building is, is giving an opportunity for somebody to connect in their own way.

[17:37] (ND) You could entirely have a relationship to the harbor that is all about it being super polluted, all about it being really inaccessible, all about it being really too big to handle, too much of a mess, to deal with, too many conflicts and conflicting interests. And you could just be scared of sea level rise. But it doesn't have to be that way. You could also interact with this place with joy and connectivity. When you think about how nice it is to be in a street that's full of life, there's no reason why the harbor couldn't reflect that too. It's actually really strange that New York has so much culture happening in the streets and almost none on the water.

[The East Riverwalk soundscape continues in your background, but other sounds begin to join the texture. The Staten Island Ferry churns the waterway.]

[18:15] (DB) I think we often find ourselves using the word "vibrant" to describe our vision for the future of the water, because it's a word that's very open. Because I think we have some ideas about the type of life and culture that we'd like to bring to the water, but we'd also like to create opportunities and platforms and resources for other people to bring their vision to the water. Because the thing that I think vibrancy means to us is that it is alive. And a way to describe that more is that the water in the coastline could reflect the city, and what would that be like? It feels so good to be connected to the water and your place and nature.

[An elevated subway passes overhead. Water brushes soft pebbles. Ocean crashes onto a beach.]

[19:01] (ND) I think a lot of times people feel like ecological issues don't coincide with what humans want. But this is one of the few places where, just on a very simple level, if we clean up the harbor in a way that makes it more welcoming for humans, it's also going to make it more welcoming for animals and nature to thrive.

[A collection of sounds from the episode continue to ebb and flow together. These are the sounds of NYC waterways.]

[19:19] (DB) Every time I'm on the water, I very quickly experientially begin to understand this really complex conversation of water and environment and city and waste and resources. And it's really incredible to be able to just do that experientially by exploring a place that is really interesting and beautiful.

[The waterway sounds crossfade to the sound of Coney Island Beach. Seagulls call. Ocean waves crash. Wind blows.]

[19:46] (ND) In New York, in particular, where we're at a moment of great change when it comes to how we interact with the harbor that surrounds us. And it's not all frozen and fixed and decided how it's going to be, what the future is going to be like, what kind of city we're going to live in and what it's going to look like. It is not yet decided. It's not fixed. And there's a lot of room for new voices and new ideas.

[The volume increases as a large wave begins to break. As it crashes onto land, the microphone becomes submerged by the wave. Ocean waves bubble and pulse against an underwater microphone. Stagnant lulls are interspersed by intense pressure as water collides with land—constantly pushing and pulling against the microphone.]

[20:40] (DB) And that is New York, that conversation between water and urban culture.

[A final wave breaks and the audio fades to silence.]

[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]

[20:55] (ND) This Soothing Sounds of Superfund Sites project is something we're in the middle of, so we're making new recordings in some new locations. We are still assembling what the final version is going to be like, and we are intending to publish this as a real physical album in the world.

[21:13] The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to the Tideland Institute. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.

Time's Up, Cars Suck!

New York City used to be all about car culture. But throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s, environmental advocates and community members built a culture surrounding non-polluting transportation. Eventually, these efforts helped establish the bike lane infrastructure that so many New Yorkers utilize and value today.

In this episode, “Time’s Up Cars Suck!,” Bill Di Paola (Founder of Time's Up! and Director of The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space) tells a story about biking in New York City, the establishment of the environmental group Time’s Up, and the role of grassroots and community-led initiatives in shaping sustainable urban design. Di Paola reflects on the ways that group bike rides build a sense of community and how that sense of community becomes a means for making the city a safer and environmentally healthier place.

All proceeds from this episode will be donated to Time’s Up, a grassroots environmental group that uses educational outreach and direct action to promote a more sustainable, less toxic city.

Further Resources

Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space

East Village Shrine to Riots and Radicals By John Leland

Preparing for the Convention: Protestors by Randal C. Archibold

Episode Transcript

[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]

Listen.

Listen to my voice.

To spoken words and ambient sounds.

[Bicycle gears “click” in idle. Pedals engage the gears. Someone whistles. A large group of bikers cheer and ring bells. Cars drive through Times Square. Demonstrators shout, “No pollution, no asthma!”]

Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.

[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]

Welcome to The Sonocene—

[The voice of “Time’s Up, Cars Suck!” episode storyteller, Bill Di Paola, replies.]

ecological stories told through sound.

[A group of demonstrators passionately shout at an outdoor event.]

[00:40] “Time's up, Car's Suck! Time's up, Car's Suck! Time's up, Car's Suck! Time's up, Car's Suck! Time's up, Car's Suck! Hallelujah! Welcome! Wecome! Woo!”

[The sounds of the demonstrators crossfade to a large group of cyclists yelling, cheering, and ringing bells. These sounds fade to your background.]

[00:57] Well, it's time for change, right? We need to change the way we think about stuff. You know, certainly the planet. And I am clear as day that I'm an environmentalist. I started an environmental organization 35 years ago called Time's Up. All we did is copy European designs where they had more livable cities, where there were bike lanes. There were pedestrian plazas. The trains came into the city. It wasn't about all car culture. And then you realize like, "Wow! The freedom I have being on a bicycle is like nothing else." It's an incredible sense of freedom and it's good for the planet and it's good for you.

[1:35] Today's storyteller is...

My name is Bill de Paola. I'm director of Time's Up Environmental Group and also the Director and Founder of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in New York City.

[The raucous sounds from the group of cyclists enters your foreground.]

[1:59] I was born in New York City. I was in Queens. I was in the Bronx. Never really in Brooklyn. never in Staten Island. But mostly, yeah, Manhattan. Things have really changed environmentally. Throw garbage on the ground. Blowing CFC gas. Staten Island just became one of those places where we could dump trash and have the least resistance. And years ago, we found out that the highest rate of asthma in the East Coast was in the South Bronx. A lot of environmental racism there.

[The cheering cyclists crossfade to demonstrators shouting, “...No pollution! No asthma! No pollution! No asthma!” The sounds of cheering cyclists then returns to your background.]

[2:29] Central Park was dangerous as well. And cars were just parking there. They were parking on the lawn. Why in this majorly flat city, that everything is so condensed, is no one riding bicycles? And then I realized, because I was riding a bike myself, I can answer my own question: it was incredibly dangerous. People would scream out of the car window. It was very car culture. Later on, I learned that there were places around the world where people could be in cities, and cities could be a place to live and cities could be a place for kids, and cities could be safe and cities could be clean. And it all had to do with sustainable urban design where you can design a city. And that seemed to be something I was very interested in.

[A smaller group of cyclists ride, cheer, and chant together: “Who fights the power? The bikers fight the power. And when the bikers fight the power they fight it all the way down! Who fights the power? The bikers fight the power. And when the bikers fight the power they fight it all the way down!”]

[3:24] So I wanted to make the city more livable. I started an environmental organization 35 years ago called Time's Up. All we did is copy European designs where they had more livable cities, where there were bike lanes. There were pedestrian plazas. The trains came into the city. It wasn't about all car culture. So we had to change that. And the way we change it by just increasing bicycling. Eventually led, after much demonstrating and much lawsuits and the city trying to stop us, led to the bike lanes, which led to the greenways, which led to the auto-free plazas. And it really caught on.

[Birds chirp from trees. People chat nearby. Music plays from a car stereo system in the distance. This is a soundscape from Tompkins Square Park.]

[4:10] In 1988, we worked on a lot of issues. There's this one neighborhood, you know, the Lower East Side, Alphabet City? Whatever you want to call it. That people have made a difference and they made a difference in this community where the sustainable way and it started off with kind of a tragedy or just a situation where the city was broke. And it happened everywhere. It wasn't political. People had to either leave the neighborhood or they had to fix up their own buildings because they were kind of being abandoned. The landlords left because of a financial crisis. So they had to reclaim the buildings. Then they reclaimed the community gardens. Then they developed all this work through skill-share. I'm a plumber. I taught other people to do plumbing. Other people taught how to do electricity. We wanted to empower people how to use tools, and no one showed up. So then we said, "Hey, come fix your bike." The room is packed.

[The Tompkins Square Park soundscape crossfades to the sounds of an industrial fan, casual conversation, and mechanical tools. People are fixing and cleaning their bicycles at a Time’s Up Bike Workshop event.]

[5:05] Someone might be coming because they love bicycling. Another person just wants, have nothing to do and they want to get outside and ride through Central Park. Another person just wants to meet people. Another person just wants to see something for the first time or make some new friends. I understood that that was really important, not to drill hole in the environmental message at every event. In fact, we tell the ride leaders and the event coordinators say nothing, say almost nothing. Just tell them when it starts. Tell them when it ends. Do safety stuff. If they have questions, answer it. But say nothing, because we want it to be their dream.

[The sounds from the bike workshop event momentarily cut to a group of demonstrators singing “...realize our dream!” The workshop soundscape returns to your background.]

[5:44] It did seem like this group bike ride thing wasn't really there because we were kind of discovering it, but it seemed like we were creating it by traveling places on bikes. Then we got more people and we felt safe. So then it just hit us like, damn, let's go for Central Park!

[The workshop soundscape hard cuts to a soundscape from Central Park. Cyclists ride down the bike lanes in the park. People walk and chat nearby. Birds chirp all around. Someone whistles. No cars can be heard.]

[6:00] Why would we go for Central Park? Because, in my mind, this is it! We can flip this city thing, right!? Because I'm a little bit of a strategist. Instead of, like, New York being the worst place for the environment. Why don't we focus on these famous places? Why should there be so many cars traveling through Central Park? So we'll focus on that. And then we'll focus on Times Square.

[The Central Park soundscape hard cuts to a soundscape from Times Square. Cars honk. Engines idle. People shuffle and mutter amidst the congestion. Police whistles howl.]

[6:20] And everyone was like you can't change Times Square. And I was like, we got to try, right? Because Times Square is a big one! And that should be a pedestrian plaza. It would be anywhere in the world that would be a pedestrian plaza! And it's the most famous place probably in the world.

[The Times Square soundscape continues and then slowly crossfades to a large group of cyclists yelling, cheering, and ringing bells.]

[6:49] It started off with 20 people in the first couple of rides. You know, this is like 30 years ago. So the first couple of rides, most of the people who came yelled at us and said, "the park is way too dangerous!" And we said, "no, community will make it safer." So we increased biking from within Central Park, and those rides were getting up to a hundred people. And then, therefore, it was multiplying and multiplying. So then we just around '95, we just started doing group bike rides everywhere: to Coney Island, the Central Park Ride, the Riverside Ride, the Moonlight Ride. And there was this bike ride that was kind of a little bit later on called the Critical Mass Ride. And the word "critical mass" was exactly what we were after. It was the last Friday of the month. It would last about an hour. And it really kind of like really pushed this idea of bringing in more people. We're getting numbers on the Moonlight Ride of maybe 40 new people and then maybe 80 people. But the Critical Mass could really bump it up to thousands of people a month.

[The cheering and yelling from the cyclist group increases (as if more have joined their ride).]

[7:46] You know, just the math. And that's what we need because, you know, we need to flip the city! So you want to make the rides as short as possible and people will want to go again. And that's what we were after, right? You know, make it short fun. Feed them. Throw some community, throw some music. So that really worked. And that worked around till about 2001. And then the police just really got intense.

[The sounds of the cyclist group seem to grow more intense or dark. Police sirens and more yelling can be heard clearly within the soundscape.]

[8:12] They said to us, like, "look, these group bike rides need a permit. You're blocking." We're like, "we're not blocking traffic. We are traffic."

[The sounds of the cyclist group momentarily transitions to a demonstrator stating, “We're traffic. And we have a right to be on the streets just like anybody else.” The sounds of the cyclist group and police return to your background.]

[8:24] And the weird thing is, when you look at this in history, people are going to focus on this Critical Mass Bike Ride because this is the one that got all the media attention. This is the one that had the most police. But we were putting out a calendar of events, Time's Up, which we still do today, with a lot smaller rides. So, in my mind, it wasn't just the Critical Mass.

[The sounds of the cyclist group and police fade to silence as a group leader addresses a group of cyclists: “This tour is for the Second People's Environment Bike throughout the South Bronx, and we've been touring a number of environmental sites, but also historic…”]

[8:53] So we are back in the year of around 2002. What about getting women on bikes and what about different style bikes? Because Americans are all riding bikes for sports reasons. So I started bringing these up at the meetings of Time's Up. I was like, "Hey, you know, this is kind of a big deal now. We look like we're going to win this thing. We're going to flip New York City." And, you know, they're like, "You're crazy. We're never going to get that stuff." I was like, "No, because we just have to create it.

[The dialogue from the group leader slowly crossfades to a large group of cyclists cheering and yelling.]

[9:17] Those people are going to bike to work. They'll bike to Wall Street, you know what I mean? We're going to just flip it." We got the bicycling, pedicabs, electric vehicles, kind of low tech electric vehicles. It was going well. Around 2003, there might have been 4000, 5000 people on this Critical Mass Ride. Maybe 100 people on all the other bike rides. Our bike workshops were going. We had over a hundred volunteers. So then the 2004 Republican National Convention rolls into New York City.

[Car brakes screech. A motorcycle engine revs. A group of cyclists yell nearby.]

[9:55] And we're like, just doing our thing. We're increasing biking. The city is trying to stop us. So, yeah, we put out something that said the "Bike National Convention" because we wanted to show the Republicans—I felt in a good way—like, "Hey, the cities are changing. There's people biking in all the cities." They did not see it that way. The New York City Police Department, they were like, "look, we're going to crack down on you like you've never seen before."

[The buzzing sound of a helicopter enters your background.]

[10:18] They actually showed up to our space on Houston Street and they're like, "No negotiations! You need to get a permit. You're all going to be arrested. We're going to have a helicopter, you know, above your space tonight," which they did. They flew a helicopter above a space and they surrounded our space on Houston Street. So then they tried to sue us to stop the rides. And there were several lawsuits back and forth. We won almost every lawsuit. The most important thing, if you live in a city is not free speech. It's the right to assemble and the right to have these spaces open to the public.

[The helicopter sounds fade to silence as someone uses a megaphone to address a group of demonstrators:]

[10:47] “Over the last few months an inordinate amount of police are assigned to this peaceful First Amendment activity. We saw last month, and I've seen this evening, even helicopters up in the sky. We've seen needless and false arrests being made. We've seen bike locks that have been broken by power saws. Bikes have been seized by the NYPD. Moreover, last month, for the first time since the RNC in August, orange netting was used to conduct preemptive arrests. We also have already heard this evening that the orange netting is already being set.”

[The megaphone speaker fades to silence as the sounds from a large group of cyclists enter your foreground.]

[11:37] So public space in a city is difficult. And the streets are difficult. And there needed to be allowance for other things besides cars. And we pushed it. And maybe it came a little too early, maybe it would have happened anyway. But we pushed it, and sure enough, the Republic Convention did happen.

[Sounds of conflict: police whistles blow, people yell in anger and frustration, bodies shift and push.]

[12:00] I had to get the St. Mark's Church on 10th Street. It has a big courtyard. Can we come to the church after the ride? Just because we need a safe place to end? So they said, "Sure." The ride happens. The police tried to stop it, but it goes fine. You know, we make it. But we make it to the church and they arrested like 200 people right outside the church, maybe 250. Very violently, I might add, bicyclists got arrested. I was quoted in the Times the next day that, you know, "This isn't anarchy. This isn't, you know, anti-capitalism. This is community. And community has positive things and negative things. And community in this case doesn't pollute. And community could be the future." Did we attack the Republican National Convention? Did we even go near Madison Square Garden? No, we just did a bike ride promoting nonpolluting transportation, but we called it the Bike National Convention, you know, for a month. Big deal.

[The sounds of conflict intensify. You can hear Bill exclaim, “Let them through!” Someone else yells, HEY!” Then a hard cut to silence followed by a slow fade of light traffic, pedestrians walking, and mechanical work. The sounds of Times Square slowly enter your foreground.]

[13:02] And then at a certain point, Bloomberg came in and he was like, "So what do you guys want?" And we're like, "in the most amazing city in the world with a grid system. Give us a DOT person who understands the basic concept, who went to school for it," and they did. They put in Janette Sadik-Khan. And she understood the basics. And sure enough, they started putting in the bike lanes. They started having the auto-free plazas. And finally we got the cars out of Central Park, that took a little bit more demonstrating. And they started rebuilding Times Square.

[13:34] Then somewhere between 2007 and 2010, we started working with the city and they're like, "okay, we did it. You know, no one's using this infrastructure. Go out there." I'm like, "Yes! I'm going to interview people who are in this new infrastructure that the city created because we pushed the city." And they're on the phone, because cell phones were around back then, and the Europeans, like, "you're never going to believe I'm sitting." They're inviting their friends, as I'm talking to them, to come to New York City. So these are people with a lot of money, tourists, right? They travel around the world. They have never seen New York City with sustainable infrastructure. It has always been car culture. So this is their favorite thing to do: hang out in Times Square, go in Central Park, go in a community garden. So I went back with my report, I said, "throw away these reports. It's going to happen by itself. You created it. They're going to do it." And sure enough, that's what happened. So that's the story of New York City that I was involved in.

[The sounds of cyclists yelling and cheering, bikes passing on the street, and police whistles begin to blend with the sounds of Times Square. Demonstrators begin to chant, “Time’s up, cars suck! Time’s up, cars suck!” There is a swell in volume, a swift crescendo, which then hard cuts to the soundscape of a quiet New York City. No traffic noise. Just the ambient resonance of an abandoned city.]

[14:33] COVID. Bam! Manhattan is paralyzed, gets hit harder than any other city. A thousand people dying a day! You know, we're the first person hit. We have no vaccine. We have nothing. It's crazy. No one wants to get in the subway. No one wants to do anything. But what do people think about? Like, "hey, I'm looking out the window and there's people bicycling.

[A bicycle gear “clicks” in idle. Pedals engage the bike’s gears as a cyclist propels themselves and the bike down a bike lane.]

[14:51] Yeah, that's clean air. I don't need to be in the subway. I don't need to be on a bus. Oh, wow." You know, companies then say, "well we could deliver stuff on bikes. We're already doing that. Let's step up our presence on the Internet. Hey, restaurants, why don't you go on the street?" They would had never gone on the street 20 years ago because the streets were just for cars. So when COVID came, because we had opened up this area. It really helped, I feel, safe in New York City and people like my mom, who I couldn't get food to, so I had to go online and get bicycles delivering food. And most of these bikes, were not just bicycles, they were electric bicycles which are moving the food around. Now, did this just happen in New York City? No, it happened in every city in the world! So right now, bikes got credit. I don't know how far it's going to go...

[A solo cyclist rides a bike in New York City. They pedal along a bike lane and around traffic. They audibly inhale and exhale.]

[15:38] But when you're riding a bicycle, you feel the air hit your face. You feel like when you breathe the breath, it actually comes right in your lungs and you're making the energy that's making the bike go faster. And you don't want to lose that energy by braking. And you just have this amazing feeling. And then an obstruction comes in your way—a problem, a pedestrian, a car— and you move around it. And then you realize, "Wow! The freedom I have being on a bicycle is like nothing else." It's an incredible sense of freedom and it's good for the planet and it's good for you.

[The sounds of the solo cyclist slowly fade to silence.]

[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]

[16:27] It's hard work. It is. There's no doubt about it, to do anything. These things are hard, but it's not as hard as people think, right? Because if you look at bicycling, the group bike ride concept can be done in any city where you just start a Moonlight Ride through your park and that'll increase biking and then keep trying. Never give up.

[16:46] The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to Time’s Up Environmental Group. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.