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Frequency

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Frequency

Episode 02 · · 44 min

How a City Hums

Amara Diallo measures the pitch of neighbourhoods, and the company people borrow from it.

With Amara Diallo, Urban sound researcherCities / Night

Cold open

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  1. Mara Voss

    Amara Diallo listens to cities the way other people read their clocks. She says a neighbourhood has a pitch, and it shifts when the night buses start.

  2. Amara Diallo

    In Dakar the evening drops a whole tone. In Rotterdam the trams write the meter. I am not being poetic to be kind. You can measure it. What you cannot measure, not yet, is how people borrow that hum to feel less alone on a platform at eleven.

  3. Mara Voss

    So the city is a duet.

  4. Amara Diallo

    Only if you answer it. Most of us wear headphones and call that privacy. Sometimes it is just refusal.

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