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The Bushwick Nightcrawlers

what this is

A sound piece scored for the corner of Myrtle and Broadway at night, narrated as Yelp reviews by the rats who live there. Click any pin on the map to read a review and hear it spoken in ultrasonic vocalizations slowed down to human hearing range.

The rats are not the customers. They are under the floorboards, up through the bathroom drainpipes, in the dumpsters, licking residue off discarded napkins. Yelp is the form, not the genre. The genre is ambient documentary.

The piece sits over a continuous score of the intersection itself. You hear the JMZ overhead, the ambient drone of the corner, small punctuations of street activity. The reviews layer in as you click, and stay layered. By the time you’ve heard them all, the corner is louder than when you arrived.

why

A rat couple lives outside my apartment. They used to come out together at night to forage. All anyone says about rats is that they’re dirty, but to me they seemed like a sweet couple. They might be dirty, but they were also pretty good at dirty dancing.

A few weeks ago the sidewalk was taped off. Exterminators had been through the block. I was sadder than I expected to be.

The burrow opened up again a few days later. Same spot. I still see them sometimes.

That’s how this project started. I wanted to know what they were saying.

on the rats

The cast is fixed. When Caffeine Underground closed in March 2026, the rats inherited the room. Tuesday open mic still happens, just underground. The reviews are written in the register of Andrew Karpan and Aaron Tomey’s Grime Square: observational, footnoted, slightly cruel without being mean. The project owes them stylistically.

on hearing them

The ultrasonic vocalizations played in this piece are real recordings. Rats vocalize above the human hearing range; the samples here have been time-stretched into our register. They come from a mix of Freesound contributors and Tachibana’s open dataset of laboratory rat USVs (see Credits). Leibniz called the sounds we don’t consciously perceive les petites perceptions. This is one way of moving them across the threshold.

The Yelp pastiche works in the other direction. The rats are granted a reviewer ID, a vocabulary, a star rating, an audience. All things they are normally denied. The piece is interested in both crossings.

on playback

Rats don’t write things down. Their speech is oral, never twice the same. Each playback you hear is a new performance of the same review, read in a different order of vocalizations, with different sample choices and timing. If you want to return to a specific playback (to share or study), there’s a toggle in the footer to switch from ‘in the moment’ to ‘on record’.

how to listen

credits

concept, design, sonification
Shoro Roy (Portfolio)
map and pin art
Madhura Redij
loading-screen rat
Rat by Danil Polshin, the Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)
voice and register reference
Andrew Karpan and Aaron Tomey
Grime Square

Real Bushwick venue names are used. Reviews and rat personae are fictional.

USV audio and sound design
Drawn from Freesound contributors and Tachibana’s open dataset of laboratory rat USVs.

sound design and beds

rat vocalizations (general bank)

rat vocalizations (cocaine bank)

Recorded from rats given cocaine, who vocalize with pleasure. Humans on cocaine do this too, with less peer review.

Tachibana, R. O. (2019). Dataset for USVSEG performance test. Zenodo.
doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3428024 · CC BY 4.0

USVSEG segmentation method described in:
Tachibana et al. (2020). PLOS ONE.
journals.plos.org/plosone

inspiration
“Scientists Map the Nightlife and Communication of NYC Rats…”
Scientific American (2025)

“the vermin aren’t the customers”

— Aaron Tomey, Grime Square (April 2026)