METRO LISTENING

A Call to Listening

To listen underground is to abandon the search for easy answers and embrace the questions that arise from the subterranean noise, from the ecologies of movement and stillness. It is to listen to the disruptions and the silences, the disappearances and the arrivals. What can we learn from the soil, from the bones of the earth, from the history embedded in the concrete and stone beneath us? Metro listening is not just a practice of sound, but a practice of thinking and being with the unspoken, the unnoticed, and the unseen.

Here, amidst the noise, there are deeper questions still. The metro does not simply carry us from one place to another – it carries our histories, our dislocations, our movements. It is a space where bodies pass, where they intersect, where they are marked by the rhythms of passage. And in this movement, there is both shelter and escape, both freedom and confinement.

What will you hear beneath the surface? What is waiting to be heard, and what will you choose to listen to?

Score for One or More People While Onboard an Underground Metro:

1. Without additional instructions or context, practice/improvise an act of ‘metro listening.’

 

2. From your initial experiences and impressions, formulate, for yourself, your own understanding of what ‘metro listening’ entails.

 

3. Continue to develop and refine your ‘metro listening’ practice.

 

4. After 10–30 minutes of engagement, reflect on the following questions:

• • What has changed (in your perception, awareness, or engagement with the metro environment(?))?

  • How does your body feel, and what does it seem to ask for?

  • What hopes, intentions, or purposes are emerging for your ‘metro listening’ practice?

 

5. Create a brief and accessible invitation for others in the metro to join or explore their version of ‘metro listening.’

Other notes:

 

The Murmur Beneath: Speculations on Metro Listening

To listen underground is to enter a liminal space where sound is both a guide and a veil. The metro, this system of subterranean veins, hums with energies that are both seen and unseen, heard and unheard. Beneath the ground, sounds rise like whispers from a forgotten language – sounds that speak of urgency, transit, and pause. But what of the sounds that do not reach the ear? What does the earth, the concrete, the metal hide from us? And what is it that is unhearable beneath our feet, muffled by the layers of humanity, infrastructure, and time?

The Hidden and the Unheard

Being underground is, in part, a practice of not hearing, a deliberate suspension of attention. What escapes the ear is as important as what it grasps: the hidden murmurs of decay, of rust and strain, of things quietly crumbling. The earth itself seems to sigh beneath the weight of constant motion, its rhythms disturbed by the relentless passage of metal and rubber. Beneath the surface, the soil, the rock, the concrete – all are disrupted. Can we hear the disruption itself, the invisible tremors that ripple out from these shifting foundations?

And yet, within this muted space, there is a strange utopian dream. The underground promises return, a shelter of sorts, a reprieve from the above-ground world. It is here that bodies, fragmented by the city, are brought together, even if only in fleeting, overlapping moments. But what is hidden is not only the city’s forgotten history or the tremors beneath the ground – it is also the silent politics of migration: those who are allowed to move and those who are not, those whose movements are policed and those whose bodies do not belong in the space of transport.

Movement, Listening, and Disorientation

Rather than focusing on our subterranean hearing, what happens to our listening when we go underneath; board the metro and set in movement? Movement both distorts and makes possible perception; it bends time, changes space. Movement is the stasis we are. Listening becomes an act of simultaneous being and becoming. In the metro, we are always in flux—our bodies jostling, colliding, pulsing alongside the train’s rhythm. There is no stillness, no opportunity for grounding. Instead, listening here is a kind of disorientation, a destabilizing act that calls into question not just the sounds we hear but the very nature of hearing itself. What do we hear when we are unsettled, when the ground beneath us moves? How does disorientation open the body to possibilities of listening that are normally closed off – listening not for answers but for questions?

In the depths of this disorientation, we can find a form of listening that is anarchic, utopian even. It is a listening that doesn’t seek to find order or clarity but to dwell within the chaos. The underground is a space of tension between sheltering and fleeing, between the quietude of returning and the violence of migration. The metro itself is a conduit of escape and confinement, its rhythms shaping and reshaping bodies that are always in transit. For whom is the metro a passageway to freedom? For whom does it become a cage, an enclosure of silence, of isolation?

The Politics of Movement and the Politics of Listening

In this underground realm, we must ask: who gets to move through these spaces, and who is excluded from them? Who is able to listen to the rhythm of the metro and who remains unheard, locked outside the system’s pulse? The metro is both a space of access and a boundary, a fluid but controlled zone, echoing with the voices of those who are allowed to move – people of privilege, citizens, workers, tourists – and the silence of those who are not. Those who are not allowed to move, who face borders, both physical and political, are absent in this space. What does their absence sound like? What is the political meaning of silence in a world where movement is heavily controlled, where borders dictate who is seen and who is erased?

Many forms of movement are a privilege – including moving with the metro – and listening, in this context, might become a tool for resisting silence. The act of listening underground, amidst the hum of machines, the shuffle of feet, the occasional jarring sound of friction against metal, becomes an act of solidarity with those who cannot travel, who cannot access such fleeting moments of freedom. The metro’s ecology is not neutral – it disrupts the soil, the very balance of the city’s ecosystems. What happens when the rhythms of machines replace the rhythms of nature? What has been sacrificed to the growing need for speed, for connection, for efficiency? The earth is unsettled, and in this disquiet, we listen – not just for the noise, but for the disturbance itself.

Questions Beneath the Surface

• What is the sound of the unheard—those who move in the shadows, whose presence is masked by the din of transportation? How does one listen to their absence?
• Can we listen to the disorientation of the underground as a political dislocation? How does this space reveal the injustices of migration, the borders within borders?
• What does it mean for our listening when we are constantly moving, when the ground beneath us shifts with each moment? Is there a form of listening that can only exist in movement, where one is never fixed, never grounded, always on the edge of being lost?
• What is the sound of ecological rupture? Can we hear the earth’s distress beneath the weight of human migration, beneath the endless cycles of transit? What happens to the land when the metro carves into it, when its rhythm is punctuated by the violence of excavation?
• Can listening underground be a form of returning? A return to the hidden spaces, to the quiet echoes of history, to the rhythms of life once forgotten but still beating beneath the surface?