Jessie Wender

Any object an unsuspecting pedestrian is carrying quickly becomes a makeshift umbrella, and actual umbrellas quickly become hazards themselves, catching the wind or flipping inside out.

Until recently, whenever news was slow, The New York Times sent photographers out to take “day shots” — slice-of-life images arresting enough to carry the front page. Weather, and people dealing with it, often made great subjects. “When it rains, it’s a whole different scene,” said Bill Cunningham, the renowned Times staff photographer, in the 2010 documentary “Bill Cunningham New York.” He explained: “Things happen. People forget about you. If they see you, they don’t go putting on airs. They’re the way they are.”

The best of these photos make you feel caught in a downpour yourself. All they need to make you feel truly soaked, though, is sound. So we asked Craig Henighan, a sound artist who has created and mixed sound for projects like “Stranger Things,” “Roma” and “Noah” — a rain movie if there ever was one — to create short soundtracks for the images. (Those soundtracks accompany the online version of this article at nytimes.com/pasttense.)

When Henighan looked at The Times’ images, he heard a soundtrack in his head: Chevys and Fords with V-8 engines. Distant sirens. Footsteps. To create these soundscapes, Henighan layered and mixed tracks of rain, wind and city sounds.

“I added some reverb and slap echo to mimic how sounds react on a city block,” he said in an email. “I would equalize each sound to make them feel a little more retro and match the black and white of the photos. I also did some panning through the stereo field to give movement, to replicate what real life is like in New York with things constantly coming at you.”

Because the past is often studied through photographs, text and other visual documentation, we tend to underplay the other four senses. Historian and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient Emily Thompson studies and writes about sonic cultures of the past. She explained in an email: “Visual records like photographs identify different sources of sound present in the environment, such as animals, vehicles, tools, musical instruments or alarm devices. But while the visual content is neatly bounded by the four sides of a photograph’s frame, sound is less well-behaved. It doesn’t respect boundaries much at all. So a photograph of a city street scene will reveal clues to many of the sounds heard by the people on that street at the moment that photo was taken. But the sounds that dominated the scene might have been located just out of frame — a firetruck approaching from down the block, for example.”

One record of what rain in the city sounded like in the late 1960s and 1970s can be found in the work of Irving Teibel. Teibel was not your typical field recordist: He was less interested in documenting sound as faithfully as possible than he was in its psychological properties, often splicing together and manipulating recordings for particular effects.

“He treated magnetic tapes as a medium, the way that a painter would treat watercolor or oil paint,” said Jessica Wood, an assistant curator of the Music and Recorded Sound Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “He liberated recorded sound from just being secondary to whatever it’s recording and elevated recorded sound to being an art form in and of itself.”

Teibel’s archive is being digitized at the New York Public Library. Wood shared a rarely heard May 1970 recording — one of Teibel’s more unvarnished — which captures a rainstorm in Chinatown, so we could pair it with a photograph from the same neighborhood and time period.

You see the scene but also hear the clamor of the street. The pairing conveys a sense of time and place, aural and visual, a reminder that like the rain, we too are a passing part of the landscape.

In the sound stream Vintage sights and sounds of a rainy city

When a hard rain descends on New York, the whole city feels it. Traffic stands still, puddles get deceptively deep and even the most intrepid of us cower in the wakes of passing cabs.

In the sound stream: Vintage sights and sounds of a rainy city

Politics

Local

Filla

World

News

Football

Ghana Premier League

Black Stars

Sports

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

About

Highlights

Selection Criteria

Jury

Terms And Conditions

FAQs

Pulse Influencer Awards

Explore categories

Pulse Ghana is the most followed news and entertainment platform, informing and engaging young Ghanaians round the clock, providing updates by the hour.

Jessie Wender

Articles written by the author

In the sound stream: Vintage sights and sounds of a rainy city