As the world ground to a halt at the onset of COVID-19, New Yorkers quickly found themselves in a city that felt forever changed. Overnight, the familiar cacophony of daily city life was replaced by sirens and silence, leaving millions of New Yorkers uneasy and longing for comfort.

We, along with our partners at the New York Public Library – a usually-quiet institution, had an idea. To give New Yorkers some comfort in this uniquely challenging time, we created an album called “Missing Sounds of New York” and released it on Spotify. This 8-track record featured carefully recreated soundscapes of the formerly bustling city, made remotely and entirely from memories that felt increasingly distant as the days in quarantine progressed. In just three weeks we mixed archival audio, sound libraries and 100 New Yorkers in 10 different languages into authentic soundscapes with nuance and details every New Yorker from the Bronx to Staten Island would recognize.

Producing the album was of course no easy feat, as we sought to capture and celebrate New York at its noisiest and most beloved. In these early days of the pandemic, we weren’t able to capture these sounds naturally as they happened at our local bar or subway station during our daily commute. Instead, we had to create these soundscapes layer by layer: asking fellow New Yorkers to transform their closets into makeshift sound booths with blankets and their trusty iPhones to capture some inane banter, or scouring old Instagram stories to capture authentic snippets of life before lockdown. There were no lengths we wouldn’t go to ensure that what we created was an authentic, realistic and visceral experience for every listener.