It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. When was the last time you listened, really listened to your city?

I think I started exploring the city by sound because it's something that many people talked about for years and I avoided doing it for years.

David Rothenberg is a composer who's famous for recording and playing music

with whales, birds, insects, but recently he's turned his attention to a different kind of sound,

cities. Like his own, New York.

So the plan was to get a bunch of people together, give them all audio recorders with headphones and microphones and

crank up the sound, make the city louder. I picked something really interesting and compact that I knew would sound interesting, this part of northern Manhattan.

There are these big tunnels and elevators in the subway stations, and there's like mountains in the city, so you start in the one train,

191st first street really a

quarter mile long graffiti covered tunnel under the bedrock you have this microphone or this recorder

with the built-in microphone, you move it around.

You're directing what you hear.

You hear the echo in different spaces.

You hear what it's like to be in a quarter-mile-long tunnel or confined in an elevator.

It is a grungy elevator

But there's an elevator operator

But there's an elevator operator

Shilla you helping me drink it because it's our birthday

So I said I told you to order that

And they start talking about some party

And you come out at the top and you hear all these birds

that are living in the top of the elevator shaft

...