San Francisco: The Soundtrack
Cable cars, foghorns, sea lions, and sirens: the everyday sounds that make up San Francisco's soundtrack.
Every great movie has an epic soundtrack. So it feels necessary to document the background noises that capture the essence of San Francisco: the sounds that follow the people building the AI revolution and the apps you begrudgingly spend far too much of your time on.
1. The cable cars. The distinct, persistent hum of the cable car system. I have a hard time not imagining those moving cables as something alive, living underground. Incredibly epic.
2. The EVs. The ubiquitous hum of San Francisco's electric cars. The noise is legally mandated to alert pedestrians to vehicles that go silent at low speeds. It's a charming sound to wake up to in the middle of the night, when an EV drops off your neighbors after a night out. Sadly, I couldn't find a recording of a Waymo or a Tesla, but the sample below is pretty close.
An electric vehicle's Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS)
3. The SFPD siren. Difficult to describe, best heard. It rarely stays on one note for long: a long rising and falling wail that suddenly breaks into a frantic yelp at an intersection. The sound bounces off the hills so you can never quite tell which street it's coming from. In a dense city built on slopes, you hear it long before you see it, and long after it's gone.
Sample of a an SFPD siren cycling through its wail and yelp
4. The foghorns. You can hear them as far as Russian Hill, especially at night. There are several on the Golden Gate Bridge alone: a deep single note from the south tower and a higher pair of notes from mid-span, so ships can navigate by ear. Bridge workers still switch them on by hand when the fog rolls under the deck, and in summer they can sound for hours, sometimes days. To someone who grew up in Europe, they sound vaguely like a train horn, though I can't say I've ever heard this exact melody. More on the bridge's foghorns and their sequence.
The Golden Gate Bridge foghorns on a foggy day
5. The sea lions. Similarly, you can hear the sea lions at Pier 39 at night. They showed up uninvited in late 1989, took over K-Dock by early 1990, and the marina simply gave it to them. The barking, grunting, and occasional squabbling carries across the water well past the point where the tourists have gone home. On a quiet night it sounds less like animals and more like an argument in a crowded bar. By the way, you can watch the sea lions live on the Pier 39 sea lion cam.
The sea lions of Pier 39
6. The seagulls. Mostly Western gulls, the big, loud locals that nest on Alcatraz and patrol the waterfront like they own it. Their cry starts as a long, mournful call and dissolves into something that sounds like laughter. They're quite funny if you get a chance to observe them.
Western gulls at the Giants game
7. The Golden Gate Bridge. Honorable mention. One sound I miss is the bridge's wind hum, which I believe has since been fixed. It came from the new railing slats catching the wind. I remember hearing it at night all the way from El Cerrito. It sounded like an idling train right next door, and it took me a while to figure out where it was coming from. But it's not unusual to hear sounds like these around the Bay.
The Golden Gate Bridge humming in high wind
There are many more, but these are the ones that strike me most. They follow you as you move across the city in pursuit of a job, of love, of funding, of happy hour, of anything, really.
If I moved somewhere these noises didn't exist, I know I'd feel a deep melancholy for them.
