Tracing efforts to control unwanted sound-the noise of industry,
city traffic, gramophones and radios, and aircraft-from the late
nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Since the late nineteenth
century, the sounds of technology have been the subject of
complaints, regulation, and legislation. By the early 1900s,
antinoise leagues in Western Europe and North America had formed to
fight noise from factories, steam trains, automobiles, and
gramophones, with campaigns featuring conferences, exhibitions, and
"silence weeks." And, as Karin Bijsterveld points out in Mechanical
Sound, public discussion of noise has never died down and continues
today. In this book, Bijsterveld examines the persistence of noise
on the public agenda, looking at four episodes of noise and the
public response to it in Europe and the United States between 1875
and 1975: industrial noise, traffic noise, noise from neighborhood
radios and gramophones, and aircraft noise. She also looks at a
twentieth-century counterpoint to complaints about noise: the
celebration of mechanical sound in avant-garde music composed
between the two world wars. Bijsterveld argues that the rise of
noise from new technology combined with overlapping noise
regulations created what she calls a "paradox of control." Experts
and politicians promised to control some noise, but left other
noise problems up to citizens. Aircraft noise, for example,
measured in formulas understandable only by specialists, was
subject to public regulation; the sounds of noisy neighborhoods
were the responsibility of residents themselves. In addition,
Bijsterveld notes, the spatial character of anti-noise
interventions that impose zones and draw maps, despite the ability
of sound to cross borders and boundaries, has helped keep noise a
public problem. We have tried to create islands of silence, she
writes, yet we have left a sea of sounds to be fiercely discussed.
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