City sound

If you had walked down 42nd Street in New York City in 1850, and then again in 1910, you would likely have heard quite different collages of sounds.  Urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and technological developments all contributed to changing experiences of sound perception in cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Recent historical sound theorists have begun to take up the concept of the “soundscape” in their work, engaging R. Murray Schafer’s work in The Tuning of the World (1977) on the “soundscape” as “any portion of the sonic environment regarded as a field for study” (Schafer 274).  Sound historians research how artifacts of sound, such as recordings, written documentation, or architectural materials register how a particular place, population, and period might have actually been heard.

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Try this “soundwalk” experiment: choose an area of Vancouver to walk around, such as Granville Street downtown, West 10th, or Commercial Drive, and take notes on the qualities and kinds of sounds you hear.  If you have access to a portable recording device, you could also record your walk.  Then, choose a second area either in Vancouver or in another city (the next time you leave town), and take notes on this different sonic environment. 

  • How do the two soundscapes compare? What is distinct about each area?
  • Would the sounds you have noted help you to describe particular social, architectural, economic, or demographic features of the urban area?
  • Which audible elements might be considered “sound,” and which might be considered “noise”? 

 

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Sounds of the nineteenth-century city

It is difficult to generalize about sound across regions of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, since cities were engaged to different degrees in projects of modernization. For this reason, this piece focuses primarily on New York City.  Nineteenth-century New York sound reflected the city’s industrial and urban growth and its mix of elements; traffic whistles, horses carts, factory and market bells, elevated trains, construction sounds, and voices speaking in multiple languages filled the streets.

An account of New York City in 1848 describes a “ceaseless chorus of human voices, and rattling of vehicles, and clanking of machinery, and ringing of bells, broken in upon, ever and anon, by the far-resounding echoes of ponderous hammers, fashioning into shape the iron skeleton of some new monster of the deep” (qtd. in Smith 373).  Two years later, in 1850, another writer also describes New York’s economic and population growth in terms of increasing sound levels: “Louder and louder, on each succeeding day, waxes the tumultuous hum of this bustling Babel . . . In all directions, the great city of the New World is stretching forth her restless hands, converting silent fields into crowded streets” (qtd. in Smith 373).  These two quotations signal wide-scale building projects that accompanied the city’s industrial development in the period, and also, as Mark M. Smith demonstrates, the association in the northern U.S. of increasing sound with economic and social progress.

 

Noise

While some applauded such progress, urbanization efforts, and the sounds accompanying them, others critiqued the sounds as excessive.  Nineteenth-century inventor Thomas Edison, reports Raymond W. Smilor, predicted that “increasingly noisy cities” would eventually permanently deafen their citizens (Smilor 323).  By the second half of the nineteenth century, campaigns against some forms of noise began in large cities such as New York and London.  Campaigns against city noise are also battles about defining noise. In London, upper-class white British campaigns against Italian organ-grinders in the mid-nineteenth century culminated in a Police Act of 1864 legislating music off the streets by “deny[ing] its very musicality” (Picker 46-62). John M. Picker argues that Victorian noise patrol also involves patrol of language, ethnicity, class, race, the body, nationality, and professionalism (45).  In Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (2001), Mark M. Smith describes early American constructions of sound and noise, arguing that what kind of sound was and wasn’t culturally desirable was “largely a reflection of and contributor to the formation of colonial culture and class relations” (11).  Definitions of sound, noise, and silence are often situated within cultural constructs, valuations, and exclusions. 

In the early twentieth century in New York City, reform campaigns such as Mrs. Isaac Rice’s “Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise,” (beginning in 1906) took on the work of eliminating traffic and industrial or electronic noises near hospitals and schools (Thompson 120-124).  In 1908, sound historian Emily Thompson writes, a General Order 47 called for the enforcement of extant legal codes against noise.  Thompson reports:

Noises so targeted included the shouts and bells of street vendors, the cries of newsboys, whistles on peanut roasters’ carts, and the assorted sound of roller skaters, kickers of tin cans, automobile horns, automobiles operated without mufflers, and flat-wheeled streetcars.  Yet, reports of arrests made subsequent to the order indicated that vendors, musicians, and shouters, not motorists or streetcar companies, were the only targets actually pursued by the police. (124)

Discussions about what constitutes noise and sound participate in constructing and regulating cultural articulations of identity, ownership, and delineations of public and private space.

 

Sounds of the twentieth-century city

Sounds of new technologies comprised an audible component of early twentieth-century public and private spaces; the title of the popular phonograph and later radio trade journal Talking Machine World (1905-1929) registers the pervasiveness and novelty of this new aspect of modernity.  Early phonograph and radio broadcasts were often public events; in 1905, a nickel would buy a song for listeners at phonograph installations on Coney Island in New York.  Automobiles, steam shovels, and garbage trucks also contributed to decibel levels and qualities of sound, and were at times critiqued for their noise.  By the late 1920s, complaints against radio loudspeaker noise were common.  Thompson writes that sound in early twentieth-century America was “increasingly the result of technological mediation” (2).  She also argues that as the culture of listening developed techniques and compulsions to control sound behavior, a new modern sound emerged and was privileged: one that was non-reverberant, clear, efficient, and direct (3-4). Valuation of clear, non-reverberant sound in architecture and sound recording of the modern period reflects cultural practices of attempted noise elimination on public streets. (BH)

 

Works Cited:

Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 

Schafer, Murray. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Smilor, Raymond W. “American Noise: 1900-1930.” In Hearing History: A Reader. Ed. Mark M. Smith. Athens: U Georgia P, 2001; 319-330.

Smith, Mark M. “Coda. Talking Sound History.” In Hearing History: A Reader. Ed. Mark M. Smith. Athens: U Georgia P, 2001; 365-404.

—. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 2001.

Thompson, Emily Ann. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Boston: MIT Press, 2002.