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You’re standing on the High Line. The walkways are damp, and fellow strollers have zipped on windbreakers to ward off the drizzle. Look up, and you’ll find a sky the color of poured mercury. The sound of a revving motorcycle ricochets in the canyons between the buildings. Bend your gaze to the street and you’ll stop for a moment on windows glowing amber before settling on cabs, startlingly yellow against all the gray.

A few seconds later, 400 years melt away. A recent 360-degree video dissolves into a threadbare black-and-white sketch; traffic sounds give way to waves lapping against a shoreline and distant bird calls. The present disappears, and in its place is an aural recreation of a distant past in the same footprint.

The High Line’s slice of Manhattan’s western edge is one of four sites that comprise “Calling Thunder: The Unsung History of Manhattan,” a new virtual reality project that pulls New York City’s contemporary soundtrack into conversation with its predecessors. Bill McQuay, an audio producer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, collaborated with David Al-Ibrahim, a graduate student in the interaction design program at the School of Visual Arts, on the immersive audio landscape to capture what the island probably sounded like in 1609, just before the Dutch washed ashore on a coast inhabited by the Lenape people.

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