The city was interlaced with a grid-like mesh of tarmac, avenues running this way and streets running that way. No matter what time of day you arrived, there was always some small amount of sound traffic on each street: none of them were ever truly empty. If there were no cars rumbling over the road, there were inevitably pedestrians strolling down the sidewalks together and talking about their days; or people running with their dogs barking next to them; or bikers chiming their bells in the bike lanes; or rolled up newspapers expertly landing on front steps with loud thwacks; or window washers calling to each other from high above ground level; or buses stopping and starting with the crash of pneumatics. It was a city that was defined by the incessant noise it produced, and in embracing this identity became something of a symphony. Tourists started to flock from miles around to sit in the park benches and listen to the sounds of the city, and even as they arrived, new sounds started to emerge from the infrastructure like patterns from a cloud. What made this truly spectacular was the unprecedented formation of instruments in the open spaces. The avenues running this way started to play the strings whenever cars rolled along their paths, and the footsteps of pedestrians landed on the notes of a piano whenever people walked down the streets running that way. As more and more people started paying attention to the sounds of the city, these sounds became more and more beautiful; before long, you no longer needed to be within its walls to hear its uplifting songs.