"Music of Machines"

Every day I read the Express on my way to work. Last week, a DC Rider article entitled "Music of Machines" caught my eye. Underneath the headline it said "if you let it, noise from Metro escalators can take you on a melodious ride." I thought it was so worth sharing, that I've decided to type it all up for you. That's what snow days are for, right? Article was written by Chris Richards of the Washington Post, and was published in the Express on January 18th, 2011.


"Take the west-side escalators down into the Columbia Heights Metro station and you'll be swallowed by the sound--an otherwordly mewl of screeching metal an aviary of chrome-throated ravens taunting you as you descend. But slow down a minute. Step to the right, unclench your jaw and ask yourself: Could this be music?

There's a secret jazz seeping from Washington's aging Metro escalators-- those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system with a crooked approximation of Ornette Coleman. Like human breath pushing through polished brass, they honk and bleat and squawk.

Every rush hour is a chance to immerse yourself in the accidental music of worn-down Washington. [Agreed.] But it can sound like music only if you want it to.

'There can be aestheticized ways of listening,' says Emily Thompson, a professor at Princeton University specializing in the cultural history of sound. 'You really are listening for rhythms, consonances or dissonances in a way that allows you to make cultural sense of your environment...I think turning your environment into art is something that anyone can do.'

Listen to the west entrance at Petworth. It's all honk and grind--the clatter of a hundred bop quarters cooking from 5 a.m. to midnight. The escalators at Benning Road drone like an Indian tambura while arbitrary notes squeak and blurt, as if leaked from Pharoah Sander's saxophone.

Farragut North offers a 39-second ascent to Connecticut Avenue that's both blissful and bizarre-- like late-period John Coltrane.

Is it just noise? If you want to call it that, sure.

'Noise is a part of modern urban life,' says Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal whose research explores the role of sound technologies in Western culture. 'If the city was totally quiet, people should be disturbed.'

So, instead of trying to cancel it out with cell phones and iPods, seek it out. Take the Red Line out to Wheaton, home of the longest escalators in the Western hemisphere. Measuring 230 feet in length, they provide a subterranean journey that lasts 2 minutes and 44 seconds. So much musical potential."


Wheaton is the metro stop I take from work and Columbia Heights is usually where I emerge. And let me tell you, it is a long long ride down into Wheaton's metro station. And an even longer ride up. In the five months or so that I've lived in DC, all three escalators lines have never been working at the same time at Wheaton. In fact, sometimes two of them are broken. And 230 feet of escalator is a lot to walk, up or down, without the accompaniment of the metal on metal screeching that Richards so poetically describes. I do like the idea of "turning your environment into art" though, and stopping to appreciate where you are. Let's fix the escalators and then we can all go out and build snowmen or something to celebrate. There's enough snow to go around.

Happy Thursday.