The strange stillness of the past: Toward an environmental history of sound and noise

Environmental History

Volumn 10, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 636-665

  Coates, Peter A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; NOISE;

EID: 30744432371     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/10.4.636     Document Type: Review

References (140)

1. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination (Leamington Spa, England: Berg, 1986), v.
2. On the near-ubiquity of visual metaphors in western thought and language, see Bernard J. Hibbitts, "Making Sense of Metaphors: Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse," Cardozo Law Review 16 (1994), on-line at http:// www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/meta_int.htm.
3. Mark M. Smith, "Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America," Journal of the Historical Society (Spring 2000): 65-99;
4. Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);
5. Mark M. Smith, "Making Sense of Social History," Journal of Social History 37 (Fall 2003):165-86;
6. Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004);
7. and Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
8. See also Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003), Part 2 ("Histories of Sound").
9. Mark M. Smith, "Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts," in Hearing History, ix.
10. Raymond W. Smilor, "American Noise, 1900-1930," in Hearing History, ed. Smith, chapter 20, is an abridged version of "Cacophony at Thirty-fourth and Sixth: The Noise Problem in America, 1900-1930," American Studies 18(1977): 23-38. Hearing History, published after I submitted the original version of this essay, includes abridged versions of some of the articles and book extracts that I discuss here, notably works by R. Murray Schafer (1994), Peter Bailey (1996), Alain Corbin (1998), Bruce Smith (1999), Mark Smith (2000; 2001), Emily Thompson (2002), and Richard Cullen Rath (2003).
11. Shepard Krech, III, J. R. McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant, eds., Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, 3 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2004);
12. Smith, "Heard Worlds of Antebellum America," in Hearing History, ed. Smith, 137, 160.
13. For "sonic environment," see Barry Truax, ed., Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Vancouver, B.C.: A.R.C. Publications, 1978), 126.
14. The phrase "knowing nature through sound" follows in the footsteps of "knowing nature through labor" and "knowing nature through leisure." For these two phrases, see the relevant chapter titles in, respectively, Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995);
15. and Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
16. Mitchell Snay, "Cultural History and the Coming of the Civil War," in Mark M. Smith, Mitchell Snay and Bruce R. Smith, "Coda: Talking Sound History," in Hearing History, ed. Smith, 388.
17. Lucien Febvre, "Smells, Tastes, and Sounds," in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (1942; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
18. Lucien Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1925). This book remains in print, the most recent edition appearing in 2003.
19. Guy Thuillier, Pour une Histoire due Quotidien au XIX Siècle en Nivernais (Paris: Mouton, 1977), 230-44.
20. Alain Corbin, "A History and Anthropology of the Senses," in Time, Desire and Horror. Towards a History of the Senses, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1995), 183.
21. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
22. Bells instructed plantation slaves when to get up and announced night-time curfews for their urban counterparts; yet in abolitionist hands, the tolling bells served as a metaphor for freedom. See Mark Smith, "Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America," 73;
23. Mark Smith, Listening, 35-37, 86-87,177-78.
24. Rath, How Early America Sounded, 11.
25. Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 43, 76-77, 73, 82, 37.
26. "Soundscape" made its first formal appearance in R. Murray Schafer, The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher (Don Mills, Ont.: BMI Canada, 1969).
27. Schafer also published The Book of Noise (Vancouver, B.C.: Price Print, C. 1970);
28. and The Tuning of the World (New York; Knopf, 1977).
29. The latter was republished as Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Turning of the World (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1994).
30. The World Soundscape Project left an archive of three hundred tapes of sound environments across Canada and Europe, and produced publications such as the Vancouver Soundscape (1974), European Sound Diary (1977), and Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (1978), as well as two compact disc recordings of Vancouver's soundscape in 1973 and 1996.
31. Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp continued R. Murray Schafer's work in Simon Fraser University's Department of Communication after he left in 1975. See Truax, "Soundscape Studies: An Introduction to the World Soundscape Project," Numus West 5 (1974): 36-39.
32. Smith, "Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America," 92;
33. Smith, Listening, 93, 267.
34. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 1-2.
35. For "auditory landscape," see Corbin, Village Bells, 292.
36. See, for example, Smith, Listening, 130-31.
37. Peter Charles Hoffer's coverage of the sensory aspects of environmental transformation ("sensory imperialism") dwell on sight: Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Noise receives just six index entries, three in connection with the Great Awakening and witchcraft trials. Sound fares somewhat better with fifteen entries-though most are connected to preaching and worship.
38. Schafer, Soundscape, 3, 71, 77.
39. Traffic was by far the leading cause of complaint in London. In Johannesburg, however, animal and bird noises were streets ahead of any other sound. Air-conditioning units topped the table in Chicago, while in Vancouver, British Columbia, though trucks and motorcycles headed the list, chainsaws and lawranowers occupied fifth and sixth places respectively. Ibid., 187-88.
40. Peter Bailey, "Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise," Body & Society 2 (1996): 63;
41. and Garret Keizer, "Sound and Fury: The Politics of Noise in a Loud Society," Harpers's Magazine (March 2001): 39-48.
42. Jennifer Steinhauer, "Bloomberg Seeks to Toughen Code for Noise in City," New York Times, 8 June 2004.
43. Joel A. Tarr, "The Horse-Polluter of the City," in The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1996), 323-26.
44. "The Horseless Carriage and Public Health," Scientific American 80 (18 February 1899), 98. One of the most disturbed nights I ever spent was in Venice. The nearest motorized vehiclewas far away, but sporadic outdoor conversation in the alley below my bedroom window (not to mention the clicking and clacking of heels on flagstones) effectively murdered sleep.
45. Immigrant Italian organ grinders on the streets of Victorian London were more likely to be targeted by middle-class noise abatement campaigners than noise producing entities in which their interests were at stake, such as factories and delivery carts. Noise was part of the manufacture of "otherness."
46. See Hillel Schwartz, "Beyond Tone and Decibel: The History of Noise," Chronicle of Higher Education (9 January 1998): B-8.
47. Corbin, Foul and Fragrant, 57, 59.
48. Corbin, Village Bells, 304-5.
49. Rath, How Early America Sounded, ix.
50. Raymond Smilor, "Confronting the Industrial Environment: The Noise Problem in America, 1893-1932," (PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1978).
51. Raymond Smilor, "Cacophony at 34th and 6th," 23-28;
52. Raymond Smilor, "Personal Boundaries in the Urban Environment: The Legal Attack on Noise: 1865-1930," Environmental Review 3 (1979): 24-36.
53. Smilor also contributed to a pioneering collection of essays on urban environmental history edited by Martin V. Melosi: Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).
54. Without reference to Smilor's work, Jon Agar, a British historian, has conducted comparable research on noise abatement campaigns in Britain between the 1860s and 1930s. Agar reflects on the connections between anti-noise initiatives and anti-urbanism as well as industrialized warfare's role as an impetus for reform, indicating that letters to home from the front commented on the traumatizing aural environment of the trenches as well as lice, mud, and rats. See Agar, "Bodies, Machines and Noise," in Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford, England: Berg, 2002), 197-220.
55. See also Karin Bijsterveld, "The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of Sound in European and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns, 1900-40," in Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Bull and Back, 191-222.
56. For a longer version, see Social Studies of Science, 31 (2001): 37-70.
57. Mrs. Isaac L. Rice, "Our Most Abused Sense-The Sense of Hearing," Forum 38 (April 1907): 560.
58. Emily Thompson argues that the most effective solutions to public noise problems were private ones-the design and application of improved construction materials: Soundscape of Modernity, 168. The accent was firmly on the eradication of unnecessary noise.
59. The only additional study that I am aware of is a master's thesis by Warren Bareiss: "Noise Abatement in Philadelphia, 1907-1966: The Production of a Soundscape," (University of Pennsylvania, 1990).
60. For a study of the German counter part to New York's Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise (Deutscher Lärmschutzband), founded in 1908 by the author, Theodor Lessing, see Lawrence Baron, "Noise and Degeneration: Theodor Lessing's Crusade for Quiet," Journal of Contemporary History 17 (January 1982): 165-78.
61. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, 122-23. Soundscape of Modernity is mainly about the evolution of architectural acoustics. It investigates changing interior design, especially that of concert halls, coverage culminating with the 1932 opening of New York City's Radio City Music Hall-a showcase of the latest advances in electro-acoustic science. Thompson writes about sound meters, reverberation equations, microphones, echo chambers, and sound-absorbing acoustical tiles and about places such as Boston Symphony Hall and the lecture hall at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum. Her perspective, in short, is very indoors (like the tennis courts owned by John Jacob Astor that acoustics expert Wallace Sabine cleared of a loud echo).
62. For a detailed examination of the emergence in the United States of the notion of pollution as now understood-if without reference to noise-see Adam W. Rome, "Coming to Terms with Pollution: The Language of Environmental Reform, 1865-1915," Environmental History 1 (July 1996): 6-28. One of the cases that Christine Rosen examines in her study of the tensions in the mid-nineteenth-century United States between traditional conceptions of nuisance and an inherited body of nuisance case law on the one hand and new forms of industrial pollution on the other is a complaint against the noise generated by steam locomotives and railroad machinery.
63. In Bell v. Ohio & Pa. RR Co. (1859), the presiding judge stressed the acute subjectivity of characterizations of noise and conflated the lowing of cattle and pealing of church bells with more recent industrial sounds. His attitude demonstrates how hard it was for the suffering public to get noise taken seriously as a genuine source of grievance.
64. See Christine Meisner Rosen, "'Knowing' Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840-1864," Environmental History 8 (October 2003): 565-97.
65. Michel Bayan, Noise Pollution: The Silent Problem (PBS Educational Communications Film, 1995).
66. Smith, "Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America," 67.
67. Smith, Listening, 30-31, 105-8.
68. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 11-16.
69. As quoted in ibid., 13.
70. Corbin, Village Bells, 304-5.
71. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and "Civil Disobedience" (1854; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1980), 81-90.
72. On Thoreau's naturalization of mechanical sound and mechanization of natural sound, see also Smith, Listening, 127.
73. Smilor, "Confronting the Industrial Environment," 146-47.
74. John Muir, Our National Parks (1901) in The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books (London: Diadem Books, 1992), 459. All subsequent citations from Muir's book are from this compendium.
75. Muir's temporary bout of blindness following an accident with a file in an Indianapolis wagon wheel works (March 1867) is generally reckoned to have been the seminal turning point in his life, fully opening his eyes to wild nature's glories and providing the immediate spur for his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. How far this terrifying experience (he spent four weeks in bed in a darkened room before his sight returned) also heightened his appreciation of nature through the act of listening bears further investigation. I would like to thank the member of the audience who attended the session at the American Society for Environmental History's annual conference (2004) in Victoria, B.C., at which a preliminary version of this essay was delivered as a paper, for raising this matter.
76. Muir, Our National Parks, 497, 499, 544.
77. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), in Eight Wilderness Discovery Books, 247-48.
78. John Muir, The Mountains of California (1894), in Eight Wilderness Discovery Books, 399-400.
79. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (1846; reprint, Boston: Ginn, 1892), xxxii, xxxv.
80. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 129.
81. Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903; reprint, New York: Lancer Books, 1967), 141.
82. Karen R. Jones, Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves Along the Great Divide (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), 19-20, 143, 137, 52.
83. Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness (1956; reprint, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972), 147.
84. See Jim McCarthy, "The Power of Place and the Importance of Natural Quiet at Grand Canyon National Park," Boatman's Quarterly Review 14 (Spring 2001), on-line at http://www.rockhounds.com/grand_hikes/ power_of_place/. "Natural quiet" entered the lexicon of sound and noise in the 1960s.
85. Section 8 of the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act of 1975 contains an early official reference. For details, see Helen Fairley, "The Sound of Silence: Historical Perspectives on Natural Quiet at Grand Canyon," Boatman's Quarterly Review 14 (Winter 2001-02), on-line at http://www.gcrg.org/bqr/14-4/sound.html.
86. Dan McKenzie, The City of Din: A Tirade against Noise (London: Adlard and Son, 1916), 1, 4-15. In a foray into evolutionary history, McKenzie speculated as to whether barking was an "artificial" sound, indicative of the corrupting influence of domestication. Did dogs make noise in a state of nature? (11).
87. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, 126;
88. McKenzie, City of Din, 12-13. The job of the Baltimore policeman, the nation's first of this type, was to enforce quiet zones around hospitals.
89. Katzenmusik, a delightfully expressive German term-literally cat's music-denotes one of the best-known forms of the concocted animal noises that were a popular manifestation of rough music's improvised sounds.
90. The mistress admonishes the apprentices not to upset herprize pet, a haughty creature that disdains the scraps fed to the wretched employees. But the first they seek out and kill, of course, is her favorite. See Robert Darnton, "Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin," in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1985), 75-104. The quotations are from an account by one of the apprentices that forms an appendix to Darnton's essay (102-4).
91. Thomas Gentry, The House Sparrow at Home and Abroad (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1878), 27;
92. "The Sparrows Again," Forest and Stream 7 (July 1877): 380.
93. Olive Thorne Miller, "A Ruffian in Feathers," Atlantic Monthly 55 (April 1885): 490.
94. As quoted in Sutter, Driven Wild, 181, 192, 205, 241-42.
95. Sutter, Driven Wild.
96. For "industrial tourism," see Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Ballantine, 1968), 45.
97. Sigurd F. Olson, Listening Point (1958; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 7-8;
98. The Singing Wilderness includes chapters entitled "Silence," "Wild Geese" and "Wilderness Music."
99. Olson, Singing Wilderness, 130-32.
100. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, supersonic aircraft and airport expansion provoked a loud debate in the United States and Britain. See Melvin Horwich, Clipped Wings: The American SST Conflict (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982).
101. Roderick Nash, "Ideal & Reality in 'Ultimate' Wilderness: Aviation and Gates of the Arctic National Park," Orion (Spring 1983): 5-13.
102. Ibid., 8-11.
103. Mark Harvey, "Sound Politics: Wilderness, Recreation, and Motors in the Boundary Waters, 1945-1964," Minnesota History 58 (Fall 2002): 130-45. An air-space reserve (banning flights under four thousand feet) was fully implemented in 1952 and legally confirmed in 1956.
104. J. B. Priestley, Midnight on the Desert. A Chapter of Autobiography (London: William Heinemann, 1937), 286;
105. Olson, Singing Wilderness, 132.
106. For these figures, see McCarthy, "Power of Place."
107. Gale A. Norton, "Takings Analysis of Regulations," Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy1 (1990): 88-89. Norton was at the time a senior research fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, an arch-conservative think tank.
108. Hempton started in Olympic National Park (in his view probably the quietest). See Jane Braxton Little, "Desperately Seeking Silence," Audubon 102 (Jan/Feb 2000):70-73.
109. This conference was sponsored by the National Park Service and the University of Colorado's Center of the American West and Natural Resources Law Center. For an earlier use of this phrase, in an article about the development of quieter snowmobile, helicopter and airplane engine technology for use in wildlands, see Bruce Barcott and Jason Paur, "Silence of the Lands," Outside Magazine, October 2001, on-line at http://www.outside.away/com/outside/news.
110. "Last Words," Sierra 82 (May/June 1997): 88;
111. Mark Clayton, "Call of the Wild: Is It Cellular?," Christian ScienceMonitor, 30 September 2004.
112. See also Claudia Rowe, "Ah, Wilderness! Ah, the Sound of Cell-Phones Gossip! Ah, Nuts!," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 20 April 2004;
113. Reed McManus, "The Ring-Tone of the Wild," Sierra go (January-February 2005): 12;
114. Eleanor Randolph, "The Cell Tower Blight: Text-Message Calder, ASAP," New York Times, 26 February 2005.
115. Almost thirty years ago, Roderick Nash pondered the question of the compatibility between music and wilderness in an article about a group of professional musicians who played a series of classical concerts with a full range of instruments during a two-week float trip through the Grand Canyon-a place full of fantastic natural amphitheaters and acoustics. Intruments and musicians were roped and hauled up cliffs and floated across polls on air mattresses. See Nash, "Mozart on the Rocks: A Grand Canyon Experiment in the Relationship Between Wilderness and Civilization," Western Wildlands (Fall 1977): 39-44.
116. As quoted in Niles Carpenter, The Sociology of City Life (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1932), 207.
117. U.S. authorities investigated the effect of aircraft sound on milk production levels in the late 1950s. Concern for livestock-as well as horses and pheasants-had been a major element in early nineteenth-century British apprehension regarding the coming of the railroad.
118. Bernard Krause, Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World (Berkeley, Calif.: Wilderness Press, 2002), 31.
119. Paul Rincon, "Orcas Boost Call Amid Boat Noise," 28 April 2004, on-line at http://news.bbc.co.uk.
120. Schafer, Soundscape, 84-85.
121. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
122. Edmund Russell, "Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field," Environmental History 8 (April 2003): 204-28.
123. William Wordsworth: The Poems, Vol, 2, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Penguin, 1977), 665.
124. Obituary, New York Times, 15 April:1964;
125. Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 214-15.
126. Krause, Wild Soundscapes, 3.
127. According to David Garrioch, sound "formed part of people's way of navigating in time, space and in the social world of the city." "This is easiest to imagine," he explains, "if we think of the way blind people navigate the streets: work noises marked particular shops, the clinking of beer mugs a tavern, the traffic noise a major intersection": Garrioch, "Sounds of the City: The Soundscape of Early Modern European Towns," Urban History 30 (2003): 6-7, 14, 20. These propositions could be usefully tested in a rural context and with reference to wild places.
128. Another impressive natural sound archive is the California Library of Natural Sounds in the Natural Sciences Department at the Oakland Museum, which also hosts the web site "Listening to Nature: A Sound Walk across California." On-line at http://www.museumca.org/ naturalsounds/home.html.
129. Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Films (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
130. The big question, for Smith, is how a Shakespearean play would have sounded when performed in the wooden Globe Theatre in 1599, a time when people spoke of going to hear rather than to see a play: Sensory Worlds, 8, 17.
131. Smith, "Making Sense of Social History," 179.
132. For lively discussion of these methodological matters, see Smith, Snay and Smith, "Coda," 365-404. These exchanges originally appeared in the Journal of the Historical Society (Sumer/Fall 2002).
133. Rath, How Early America Sounded, 42.
134. Muir, Mountains of California, 399.
135. Ibid.;
136. McKenzie, City of Din, 20.
137. John James Audubon, from Ornithological Biography (1831-38), in Sunshine and Smoke: American Writers and the American Environment, ed. David D. Anderson (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1971), 169, 171.
138. Smith, "Heard Worlds," in Hearing History, 160.
139. Also see Smith, "Making Sense of Social History," 165-86.
140. Smith, "Making Sense of Social History," 177.