tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us

Alexis Madrigal on the quest to find the first soundscape:

When people look back at 2010, they will have a pretty good idea about the noises dense agglomerations of people make in our time. Touring the sound of these cities across the globe, I began to wonder if I could do the same thing in time. Could I go back a hundred years and listen to New York or Paris?

There will always be a large gap between our visual and audio historical records. Decades when we can see our places, but not hear them. We will never know what New York, Los Angeles, or any other city sounded like before the automobile hit the streets and electricity was commonplace. Some things, like what it sounded like for a million Americans to live together without internal combustion engines on wheels, can be lost forever.