Noise

A Human History of Sound and Listening

David Hendy

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062283092
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

What if history had a sound track? What would it tell us about ourselves? Based on a thirty-part BBC Radio series and podcast, Noise explores the human dramas that have revolved around sound at various points in the last 100, 000 years, allowing us to think in fresh ways about the meaning of our collective past.

Though we might see ourselves inhabiting a visual world, our lives have always been hugely influenced by our need to hear and be heard. To tell the story of sound—music and speech, but also echoes, chanting, drumbeats, bells, thunder, gunfire, the noise of crowds, the rumbles of the human body, laughter, silence, conversations, mechanical sounds, noisy neighbors, musical recordings, and radio—is to explain how we learned to overcome our fears about the natural world, perhaps even to control it; how we learned to communicate with, understand, and live alongside our fellow beings; how we've fought with one another for dominance; how we've sought to find privacy in an increasingly noisy world; and how we've struggled with our emotions and our sanity.

Oratory in ancient Rome was important not just for the words spoken but for the sounds made—the tone, the cadence, the pitch of the voice—how that voice might have been transformed by the environment in which it was heard and how the audience might have responded to it. For the Native American tribes first encountering the European colonists, to lose one's voice was to lose oneself. In order to dominate the Native Americans, European colonists went to great effort to silence them, to replace their "demonic" "roars" with the more familiar "bugles, speaking trumpets, and gongs."

Breaking up the history of sound into prehistoric noise, the age of oratory, the sounds of religion, the sounds of power and revolt, the rise of machines, and what he calls our "amplified age, " Hendy teases out continuities and breaches in our long relationship with sound in order to bring new meaning to the human story.

Notes

Introduction

1. The phrase is from the British physicist G. W. C. Kaye, quoted in Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., & London: MIT Press, 2008), p. 240.

2. Quoted in Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., & London: MIT Press, 2004), p. 132.

3. John Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ (1937), in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), John Cage: An Anthology (New York: De Capo Press, 1991).

4. Quoted in Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, pp. 143–4.

5. Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Sensory Experiences: Smells, Sounds, and Touch’, in Elizabeth Foyster and Christopher A. Whatley (eds), A History of Everyday Life in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 217.

6. Hillel Schwarz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (New York: Zone Books, 2011); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Mike Goldsmith, Discord: The Story of Noise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

7. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 1.

8. Dan MacKenzie, The City of Din: A Tirade against Noise (London: Adlard & Son, Bartholomew Press, 1916), pp. 1, 25.

9. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1994), p. 84.

10. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 2.

11. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass., & London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 5.

1. Echoes in the Dark

1. Ian Cross and Aaron Watson, ‘Acoustics and the Human Experience of Socially-organized Sound’, in Chris Scarre and Graeme Lawson (eds), Archaeoacoustics (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2006), pp. 107–16.

2. Ibid., p. 108–09.

3. Iégor Reznikoff, ‘Prehistoric Paintings, Sounds and Rocks’, in Ellen Hickmann, Anne D. Kilmer, Ricardo Eichmann (eds), Studien zur Musikarchäologie III (Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2002), pp. 44, 47–8.

4. Ibid., pp. 42–4, 47–8.

5. Iégor Reznikoff, ‘The Evidence of the Use of Sound Resonance from Palaeolithic to Medieval Times’, in Scarre and Lawson, Archaeoacoustics, pp. 78–9.

6. Ibid., p. 80.

7. Steven J. Waller, ‘Intentionality of Rock-art Placement Deduced from Acoustical Measurements and Echo Myths’, in Scarre and Lawson, Archaeoacoustics, pp. 31–9.

8. Ian Cross, ‘Lithoacoustics – Music in Stone: Preliminary Report’, http://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/~ic108/lithoacoustics/ (October 2000).

9. Cross and Watson, ‘Acoustics and the Human Experience’, in Scarre and Lawson, Archaeoacoustics, p. 113.

10. Ibid., p. 114.

11. Steven J. Waller, ‘Psychoacoustic influences of the echoing environments of prehistoric art’, Paper for the Acoustical Society of America, Cancun (November 2002).

12. Waller, ‘Intentionality of Rock-art Placement’, in Scarre and Lawson, Archaeoacoustics, p. 35.

13. David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), pp. 148–9.

14. Chris Scarre, ‘Sound, Place and Space: Towards an Archaeology of Acoustics’, in Scarre and Lawson, Archaeoacoustics, pp. 1–10.

15. Cross, ‘Lithoacoustics’.

16. Francesco D’Errico and Graeme Lawson, ‘The Sound Paradox: How to Assess the Acoustic Significance of Archaeologica...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Prehistoric Voiceprints
• II. The Age of Oratory
• III. Sounds of the Spirit and of Satan
• IV. Power and Revolt
• V. The Rise of the Machines
• VI. The Amplified Age
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright
• About the Publisher