While riding the T yesterday I had this idea for a project when the, assumably, automatic recording came on to inform me I was pulling into Harvard Station, although since I was on the T it would then stop in the tunnel, wait for five minutes, and then travel the only one-hundred more feet to the actual platform.

This announcement reminded me of the heraldic one I heard before the train arrived at my boarding station telling me the that this same Alewife bound train was approaching. I wondered if they are somehow triggered at the same time and what that might sound like if I could be both where I was and where I was going to hear about both ends of my trip. At that moment I was being made to think about the geography of my trip by these two announcements. I figured that even if the ‘pulling into the station’ announcement and that station’s ‘train approaching’ announcement are not triggered by the same event, they must overlap at least sometime.

There are 125 stations in the Boston subway system and I’d like to create an aural map of (under-served) Boston, a map of geography and time, by recording all of these announcements throughout the day (minus the “This is Dan Garbageface, stay vigilant, bitch.”). My hope is that with trains arriving every 4-20 minutes I’ll arrive at something with a narrative, musical feel and not a (too) jumbled mess. On the other hand I wonder what the potential wide open portions might feel like.