Think of pavement as a rough sound ribbon whose recording and playback mechanisms are shoes, hooves, wheels, canes, pelting rain, hail, and other falling objects. For each groove, rut, or pothole worn into the surface, the pavement returns a vibration peculiar to the shape and depth of the fissure and to the weight, pressure, pace, and contact-Contour of each footfall, hoof-beat, or Wheel-spin. In this sense, pavement is more sonically dynamic and temporally responsive than any gramophone or (as first conceived by Valdemar Poulsen during the 1895) magnetic recording Wire.
Hillel Schwartz - Making Noise - From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, MIT University Press, 2011