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No city has been sounded and celebrated by composers and musicians as thrillingly as New York and, in particular, Manhattan – a place where 800 languages are spoken, and even more musical genres are currently being played, remade and born.

-  Tom

The hum that Manhattan makes has been calculated to vibrate at an infrasonic, body-shakingly low B flat, the sum total of billions of interactions between electronic signals, traffic noise, construction, wind, weather and the ceaseless currents of human-made music and conversation.

Pieces about New York have been made by the most imaginative of the ‘weirdos’ who move there and who visit it – that’s the Illinois-born Laurie Anderson’s affectionate collective term for the creative immigrants, like her, who flock to the city to etch new chapters in its story of sound. After he arrived in New York in 1915, France’s Varèse dreamt of Americas past, present and future in his piece