The World I Hear

As a student of New York's Hunter College, I'm quite familiar with the hustle and bustle sounds of the city. The endless cavalcade of cars, trucks, and buses creates a harmony of noise that resonates throughout the avenues of the sprawling metropolis. Whether one defines the report as thrilling is entirely personal choice. There are those who enjoy the sights and sounds of Manhattan, and those who simply do not. I fall in the latter category, much to the surprise of those in Hunter who first meet me, not to the surprise of those who truly know me. The obnoxious, blaring, incessant racket which pounds away at my ear fills me with tension, an uneasy state where the smallest obstacle to my frantic journey home can set me over the edge.
Now despite my most humble opinion, all sounds within our daily lives can be defined as musical, even those which we wish to ignore. In the most modern sense of the word, music can be found in any rhythmic sound which follows a distinctive pattern. In this case, the many noises heard in New York surely create a grandiose philharmonic orchestration with its taxi french horns and its tire-meets-sewer cap drum beats. Each individual sound adds to the sonata of the city, a furiously notated piece conducted by some unseen maestro. Whether or not we find the piece pleasing to the ear is, once again, and I can't stress this enough, a matter of personal choice.