The Washington Post ran an article this week on the “secret jazz” of escalators that descend into the DC Metro system.  A popup multimedia window lets us listen in to the very different sonorities of five metro station escalators, and a related page from the Post’s music staff invites readers to download the clips and send in a remix; they’ll post their faves after the holiday weekend.

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