The ethnologist Frances Densmore spent over 50 years preserving North American First Nations' music in collaboration with the the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. She worked with the Blackfoot, Chippewa, Mandan, Hidatsa, Sioux, Arapaho, Seminole, and Kuna First Nations as well as the Northern Pawnee of Oklahoma, Papago of Arizona, and multiple FNs from Washington and British Columbia.

photos: recording Mountain Chief of the Montana Blackfoot Nation, 1916

The Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators from Roman Mars' 99% Invisible

Since the industrial revolution, when it became possible for products to be designed just once and then mass produced, it has been the slight imperfections and wear introduced by human use that has transformed a quality mass produced product into a thing we love. Your worn blue jeans, your grandmothers iron skillet, the initial design determined their quality, but it’s their imperfections that make them comfortable, that make them lovable, that make them yours.

Chris Richards is a music critic for the Washington Post, and after years of ignoring the wailing and screeching of the much maligned, often broken escalators in the DC Metro, he began to hear them in a new way.