The Subway Above Ground

Income inequality is a defining characteristic of New York City, but it is easy to be unaware of it. Many New Yorkers use the subway to get around, rendering the above ground conditions of the places we travel through largely invisible. In this piece, I use music as a metaphor and measure of inequality, and the subway as a means of following the data through space and time.

Here you can stream or download one of 46 media files that loosely follow full rides along 23 of the MTA subway lines in both directions. Once you start to play the file, find your station, and listen to the song in the background as you ride the subway. The quantity and power of the instruments at any given moment in the song correspond to the median household income of the neighborhood that you are passing through. The result is a meditative piece in which the dramatic contrasts of a song echo the dramatic differences of income in the city.

This piece is part of the 2021 Data Through Design: Ground Truth Exhibition. You can also visit this piece's sister project that turns this same data into a 3D interactive map

Created by Brian Foo using Median household income by census tract, 2017 ACS 5-year estimates (B19013) and MTA subway station data. Code is open source.