In New York, the sound of trash may be as familiar as its smell.

The booming thunder of an 18-ton garbage truck rumbling down the city’s rutted roads. The screeching hum of the compactor, the pops and crackles of the refuse within. The honk, honk, hooooooonk of traffic backing up behind it.

On Roosevelt Island, the sonics of garbage are the jet-engine roar of a 1,000-horsepower vacuum buried within the bowels of this two-mile spit of land. Not that most residents would know it. All they hear are birds chirping, joggers panting and water rippling in the East River as pneumatic tubes buried beneath their feet do the dirty work, silently sucking garbage from their buildings at 60 miles per hour.

This invisible garbage has other benefits, too, especially at this time of year.

“It’s nice to walk out your door, and it doesn’t smell like a heaping pile of trash, like in Manhattan,” Abbie Kulhowvick, a former Upper East Side resident, said as she walked home from work last week.