Soundscapes

An abstracted and tentative outline of history professor Emily Thompson‘s interesting book, The Soundscape of Modernity. Note that this is not her table of contents, but my own sense of the book’s formal arc. Maybe it’s strange to extract this outline from an already mapped out narrative of events, but there has always been something about historiography—that is, the writing of history—that makes me uneasy. Using narratives to stitch together an event makes more sense to me than using events to stitch together a narrative. The former construction seems more proud of its stitches.

1) traditional sound, space, and listening – surveys some final intersections of reverent performance spaces and music as Art with a capital ‘A’ before the opening of Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1900, the first building engineered with the new science of acoustics developed by Wallace Sabine. The strange condition of listening as “a way to worship at the temple of great art” (47) and “an elevating mental recreation which is not an amusement” (49). The relationship of these three elements—space, sound, and listening—begins to shift around this historical period.

2) sound rediscovered – The experienced (shells) and applied (proto-radar) sound of WWI. The process of listening and the concept of sound become increasingly externalized as machines come to help us understand the physics of sound. From its very inception, our understanding of the physical reality of sound is mediated. Amazingly, a formal science of sound didn’t really exist until the early 1900s.

3) noise – the new problem of uncontrollable “noise pollution” in the modern city from 1900-1933.

4) listening redefined – cathedrals and temples begin using new sound muffling technologies in order to hollow out a silent, reverent interior space by merging new technologies with classical design. The natural sound signatures that had always been ascribed to certain types of spaces become a thing of the past.

5) space redefined – “modern” architecture in late 1920s begins to hermetically seal off outside noise pollution and integrate all interior systems: acoustic insulation, ventilation, and lighting all work in concert. The advent of wholly manufactured interior environments.

6) sound redefined – newly engineered sounds that are freed from spatial restrictions by radio, phonograph, and telephone, begin to fill these hermetically sealed spaces.