What does Washington sound like to you?

       I suppose that depends on your Washington. It might sound like a drummer pounding out a Chuck Brown rhythm on an overturned bucket. Or a John Philip Sousa march wafting from the Marine Barracks. The sound of Washington might be the cheery chime of a closing Metro door or the strident chant of a protest march.

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       Those are the sorts of sounds the Smithsonian is hoping to plot on a new map devoted to capturing D.C.’s aural landscape.

       The way we experience a place involves all our senses, said Sojin Kim, who with Nichole Procopenko curated “DC: The Social Power of Music,” presented by the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

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       “Those of us who have hearing realize when we don’t hear something how different a place will seem,” said Kim. “Conversely, memories are often triggered by the sound of something. .？.？. Sound overwhelms us. It makes us feel crazy sometimes. It soothes us sometimes.”

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       The centerpiece of the project is an interactive online map of the District and its environs to which users can drop a pin and add points of sound, whether that’s taps performed by a lone bugler at Arlington National Cemetery or a drum line at the Palisades Fourth of July parade.

       Not all the listings have sound clips. Users can add images instead, such as old fliers, posters or photos, like the one of Albert Mogli, who for 40 years ran a violin repair shop on F Street NW.

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       The Smithsonian curators salted the map with stars that denote performances on the Mall during the Folklife Festival. But there was no desire to make the map an official document. It’s meant to be grass-roots, homespun.

       “I think for a project like this, it would be doing a disservice for us to decide what’s important,” said Procopenko. “We can’t possibly know. Being an open invitation, I hope it tells people that all of their experiences with music and sound in D.C. are important and valid.”

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       The idea for the project came about in 2018. “The conversations we had were based around losing venues because of gentrification,” Procopenko said.

       The coronavirus pandemic pushed pause on the project, but it also meant that with the economy in free-fall, even more venues were going dark.

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       “We were thinking a lot about: How do you document stuff that’s not there,” Kim said.

       Procopenko had experience with that. She’d earlier used a geographic information system application to create a map of places lost during a wildfire in her hometown, Santa Rosa, Calif.

       “The project asked people to put in memories of places that burned down,” she said. “That kind of served as a jumping-off point that evolved into how you capture places that are going through ephemeral moments in time.”

       In addition to the map, the Smithsonian commissioned eight brief videos that explore the sounds of the city, one for each ward, with an introduction from music journalist Steve Kiviat.

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       “We didn’t really give strict instructions,” said Procopenko, who since 2016 has worked with Ian MacKaye to archive material at the punk label Dischord Records.

       The contributors to the eight “Wardscapes” include poets, musicians and an ethnomusicologist, Allie Martin.

       What, exactly, is an ethnomusicologist?

       “It has many definitions,” said Martin, a Mellon faculty fellow at Dartmouth. “The one that I use is that ethnomusicologists are concerned with how people build their world through music and sound.”

       For her Ward 1 Wardscape, Martin went to Seventh and Florida NW, the site of demonstrations over the go-go music coming from Central Communications, a mobile phone store and birthplace of the Don’t Mute D.C. movement.

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       Using devices more typically attached to trees in a rain forest to capture birdsong, Martin recorded the sounds of the intersection and then ran them through Google’s Chrome Music Lab to create spectrograms. These visual depictions of sound look like sonar images from the ocean floor, with multicolored peaks and valleys depicting a syncopated go-go beat, the blare of a siren and the whoosh of a Metrobus’s brakes.

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       “I’m hoping that people understand how important the sounds are together,” said Martin. “I hope that people understand that the sounds coming out of Central Communications are important to that space. You can’t have that space without those sounds. One of the things that happens in gentrifying spaces is that sounds become vulnerable to silencing.”

       At the end of her video, Martin cuts out the sound completely. The silence speaks volumes.

       To see the D.C. Music Map — and make your own contributions — visit festival.si.edu/2020/dc-music/map.

       Twitter: @johnkelly

       For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.