Loving New York, in Cacophony and in Quiet

LIKE most commuters, I spend my days in the city but sleep out in the stillness of the suburbs, where at night it’s as quiet as the grave. The only thing you hear is the occasional scrabbling of raccoons trying to knock over the trash cans. But a couple of years ago I happened to spend the night at an Upper East Side hotel, where I was pleasantly startled by two phenomena: the abundant free pornography on cable TV and, around dawn, a whining, grinding, masticating sound that I eventually recognized as a garbage truck partaking of its morning feed. This was followed by some bus rumbling and horn honking and, a few blocks away, an insistent car alarm. The city was already awake and thrumming, going about its business with none of the suburban fussiness that makes it unmannerly, for example, to crank up your lawn mower or your leaf blower before breakfast.

If you live in New York, I can understand how this kind of racket might drive you bats sometimes, but to me it was a revelation. I felt as if I were levitating off the bed, vibrating to a great urban overture, like those bright, brassy chords that introduce Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” or maybe the beginning of a percussion-heavy piece by Xenakis. The Boston public radio station WGBH used to play several minutes of bird song every morning before beginning its daily classical music program, and my hotel wake-up, it seemed to me, was the big-city equivalent, the clanking, polytonal urban version of the dawn chorus. It’s a sound that makes you want to leap out of bed, chug some black coffee and go out and get something accomplished.

In the ’30s and ’40s, when New York was probably a lot quieter than it is today, except for the screeching of theThird Avenue el, there were various, mostly unsuccessful civic campaigns to reduce the noise level. But my sense now is that except for occasional attempts to regulate sirens, or the Bloomberg administration’s recent initiative to encourage a less annoying taxi horn, people are mostly resigned to high decibels and have learned to tune out all but the most extreme city sounds: the jackhammers, the fire engine klaxons, the helicopters whapping low overhead as if left over from “Apocalypse Now.”

You wouldn’t want to listen to that racket all the time, but every now and then an ear-shattering, teeth-jarring blast, so loud you can’t hear yourself think, is sort of restorative. For a moment you have to shut down and reboot whatever was on your mind.

To hear the subtler music of the city, though, you have to teach yourself to listen. Next time you take the subway, turn off your iPod and try some unrecorded avant-garde stuff. I recommend the Times Square station, where incoming trains rumble under your feet, coming to rest with a squeak and a hiss of air brakes that could have been scored by John Cage. If you’re lucky, the guy with the musical saw will be on duty, making his eerie, keening arpeggios, or maybe the Ebony Hillbillies will be playing bluegrass tunes to the accompaniment of indecipherable loudspeaker announcements about delays on the No. 2 uptown. Your feet will start to twitch a little.

Or take a walk along 42nd Street, say, and down Fifth Avenue. After a while you’ll discover that the great ground note of New York — the basso continuo — is traffic noise, which is more tire whoosh than engine sound, punctuated every now and then by the clank of a car passing over a manhole cover. Above that, like a flatted organ chord, is the heavy breathing of idle bus engines, rising up a humming octave or so when the light changes, and the bus accelerates.

And now, if you wave an imaginary baton, here comes some honking, which — unless some bozo is really leaning on the horn — is much more cheerful-sounding than you think you remember — almost like bird song.

There is also foot noise: the clacking of high heels and, at this time of year, the occasional pop of a delayed flip-flop snapping up against the wearer’s heel. And a soft, hard-to-place chittering sound that if you pay close attention turns out to be hundreds of human conversations weaving in and out of one another in a great collective murmuration.

You don’t want to pay so much attention to these sounds that you stop in your tracks. You’re in New York, after all: You’ve got somewhere to go and you’re probably running late. What you’re listening to is background music, an extended, free-flowing jazz improv that quickens the step a little and makes you feel alive and sophisticated. A quiet city, you realize, wouldn’t be much of a city at all.