The R Train's Hydraulic Exhale at 42nd Street

There is a particular sound to a New York City subway platform in August that I have come to think of as the city's involuntary breath: the hydraulic exhalation of a braking R train, the squeak of a sneaker on tile worn slick by a century of identical sneakers, the busker on the L line whose saxophone rattles in your sternum a beat before it reaches your ears. Above ground, garbage trucks reverse through the predawn dark with chirps borrowed from cartoon birds. Construction crews on Second Avenue jackhammer in 4/4. An ambulance makes its left turn against the light. A man on Canal Street sells phone cases by shouting the words phone case with the cadence of liturgical chant.Newcomers find this unbearable. Long-term residents claim not to hear it at all, which is its own kind of fiction, the brain hasn't deleted the noise, only filed it under weather. But a third response exists, rarer and more interesting: the response of the person who decides to listen on purpose.There is a project…