The One Metro Samba

The Rio de Janeiro Metro is a peculiar urban space with its specific ambience, where the public adopts a different attitude than that outside. The Metro was built at high costs, later privatized, and characterizes a monotonous soundscape dominated by announcements, operational noise and a single background music, which plays uninterruptedly in the stations for years. The Metro's operating rules strongly limits any other musical performance. This article conducts an acoustic, musical, and philosophical analysis. As an experiment, a musical flashmob was conceived (an unexpected performance, pre-planned and coordinated on social media) to challenge this bossa nova-like atmosphere of the Metro. Unsuspected passengers are well-dressed and equipped with hidden instruments that interact with the musical theme and will enter the trains playing. The performance of the new soundscape will be recorded and analyzed. In the context of the Metro, the soundscape is fundamental to the user experience as it directly influences the perception and sensitivity of the passengers. It is the intersection of these landscapes (immaterial and material) that the article seeks to portray and analyze the possible relationships that can arise from it, often affecting those who experience them daily.