In a message Canadian Guy writes: > If you are musical, you will recognize that the common machine speeds are > those of the human voice pitches.... as opposed to working around high > speed electric or gas motors that need to be geared down to working tool > speeds, and whose high speed gearing adds another aggressive noise. The > high pitched whine makes you tense and you weary sooner. I can remember it clearly, even though it was a dozen years ago, when my children were still little. I was coming up the subway stairs (the same ones I would come up after the World Trade Center collapse) at 86th and Lexington. There were guys in those beige denim overalls cutting out the sidewalk around the subway ventilation grates - the steel grates had rusted, popping up and creating a trip hazard, and these guys were using gas concrete saws to cut around them, before they lifted the old grates out. I watched them work, and I saw - or rather heard - that it formed a sort of urban symphony, the repeated, random, intermittent rising and falling whine of the saw as the operator dipped in and then dipped out of the concrete. As a contrapunto, I heard for the first time (just like the echos in the snowbound canyons of a New York blizzard) the waxing and waning of the traffic - a roar when the light turned green, rising to wind tunnel proportions as the bulk of the traffic went through, tailing off in an adagio and diminishing to a sort of quiet idle when the light turned red. Then there was the minor movement, the crosstown traffic on the east-west street, which repeated the rhythm of the major movement, but piccolo. I pass that corner every few days; the concrete and steel is old now and stained, but I always hear the music. Best, Christopher