Listening across millennia, a cultural historian explores the
process by which noise today has become as powerfully
metaphorical-and intriguing-as the original Babel. When did the
"silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a
sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and
that colors can be loud? How loud is too loud, and says who?
Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical and
political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in
the Western experience and understanding of noise. From the
uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heard
over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback,
from shouts frozen in Rabelaisian air to the squawk of loudspeakers
and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows "unwanted
sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic
and industrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and
medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage, readers can hear
the cultural reverberations of the historical soundwork of
actresses, admen, anthropologists, astronomers, builders,
composers, dentists, economists, engineers, filmmakers, firemen,
grammar school teachers, jailers, nurses, oceanographers, pastors,
philosophers, poets, psychologists, and the writers of children's
books. Drawing upon such diverse sources as the archives of
antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks
and dental drills, letters and daybooks of physicists and
physicians, military manuals and training films, travel diaries and
civil defense pamphlets, as well as museum collections of bells,
ear trumpets, megaphones, sirens, stethoscopes, and street organs,
Schwartz traces the process by which noise today has become as
powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel. Endnotes and
bibliography are not included in the physical book but are
available online at the MIT Press Web site.
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