Chapter 4 Noise and Modern Culture, 1900-1933

CHAPTER 4 NOISE AND MODERN CULTURE, 1900-1933 "What news from New York?" "Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster." "Nothing more?" "Nothing. Radios blare in the street."1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, "My Lost City," 1932 I INTRODUCTION Writing from the depths of the Great Depression in 1932, F. Scott Fitzgerald looked back on the decade that had roared. He recalled that roar as so character- istic, so ubiquitous as to be remarkably unremarkable. Fitzgerald's contempo- raries may have been less blase, but many shared his belief that New York was defined by its din. In 1920, a Japanese governor visiting the city for the first time noted, "My first impression of New York was its noise." While initially appalled by the clamor that surrounded him, he soon became enamored of the task of lis- tening to the noise and identifying individual sounds within the cacophony. "[W]hen I know what they mean," he explained to a reporter, "I will under- stand civilization."2 The pervasive din of New York was, for Fitzgerald, foreign visitors, and countless others, the keynote of modern civilization. Some chose to celebrate this noise, others sought to eliminate it. All perceived that they lived in an era uniquely and unprecedentedly loud. Yet it seems that people have always been bothered by noise. Buddhist scriptures dating from 500 BCE l i s t "the ten noises in a great city," which included elephants, horses, chariots, drums, tabors, lutes, song, cymbals, gongs, and people crying "Eat ye, and drink!"3 And complaints of noises similar to those com- piled by the Buddha (excepting perhaps the elephants) have been voiced contin- ually over the course of the centuries. The ruins of ancient Pompeii include a wall marked by graffiti that pleads for quiet.4 An anonymous fourteenth-century European poet complained that "Swart smutted smiths, smattered with smoke, Drive me to death with the din of their dints."5 The din of eighteenth-century London was well captured by William Hogarth (see figure 4.1), and the acoustical distress experienced by his "Enraged Musician" was suffered by countless other urban inhabitants as cities' populations increased more rapidly than their geographies expanded.6 As the congestion resulting from urbanization further concentrated the noises of everyday life in the nineteenth century, the frequency (as well as the urgency) of complaint rose. Goethe hated barking dogs; Schopenhauer despised the noise of drivers cracking their horsewhips.7 Thomas Carlyle was compelled to build a soundproof room at the top of his London townhouse to escape from the sounds of the city streets.8 The sounds that so bothered Carlyle and Goethe were almost identical to those that had been identified by the Buddha centuries earlier: organic sounds created by humans and animals at work and at play. These sounds constitute the 4.1 "The Enraged Musician," William Hogarth (1741), as engraved by W. H. Watt. Hogarth's print vividly evokes the noise of an eighteenth- century city street. It further indicates the almost exclusively organic nature of that noise by casting people and animals as its primary source. William Hogarth, Hogarth Moralized (London: J. Major, 1831), facing p. 138. Princeton University Library. 11 CHAPTER 4 constant sonic background that has always accompanied human civilization. With urbanization they were certainly concentrated; with industrialization, however, new kinds of noises began to offend. The sound of the railroad, for example, became a new source of complaint. The noise of its steam whistle was disturbing not only for its loudness but also for its unfamiliarity. Carlyle could only express his distress at its mechanical scream in terms of his old, familiar enemies, comparing it to the screech of ten thousand cats, each as big as a cathe- dral. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the clanking din of the factory, the squeal of the streetcar, and other new sounds were increasingly incorporated into the soundscape.9 In spite of the presence of these new sounds, however, lists of complaint continued to emphasize the traditional noises of people and animals. In America at the turn of the twentieth century, this emphasis remained. When Dr. J. H. Girdner cataloged "The Plague of City Noises" in 1896, almost all the noises he listed were traditional sounds: horse-drawn vehicles, peddlers, musicians, animals, and bells. "Nearly every kind of city noise," he reported, "will find its proper place under one of the above headings."10 Less than thirty years later, however, this plague had mutated into a very different organism; indeed, by 1925 it was no longer organic at all: The air belongs to the steady burr of the motor, to the regular clank clank of the elevated, and to the chitter of the steel drill. Underneath is the rhythmic roll over clattering ties of the subway; above, the drone of the airplane. The recurrent explo- sions of the internal combustion engine, and the rhythmic j a r of bodies in rapid motion determine the tempo of the sound world in which we have to live.11 Not long thereafter, the amplified output of electric loudspeakers was added to the score, and the transformation was complete. When New Yorkers were polled in 1929 about the noises that bothered them, only 7 percent of their complaints corresponded to the traditional sounds that Girdner had emphasized in 1896. The ten most troubling noises were all identified as the products of "machine- age inventions," and only with number eleven, noisy parties, did "the sounds of human activity" enter the picture.12 Clearly, the sound world circa 1930 had lit- tle in common with that of 1900. (See figure 4.2.) To those who lived through that transformation, the change was dramatic and deeply felt. Some were ener- gized, others enervated; all felt challenged to respond to the modern soundscape in which they now lived. That challenge was stimulated not simply by the noise itself, but also by social and cultural forces at work in urban America. T o those who perceived it as 117 NOISE AND MODERN CULTURE, 1900-1933 4.2 a problem, noise was just one of the many perils of the modern American city, City Noise. The frontispiece including overcrowded tenements, epidemic disease, and industrial pollution. for the 1930 report of the "Noise reform" was part of a larger program of reform that included urban Noise Abatement Commission , planning, public health programs, and other progressive efforts to apply expert of New York City made clear that the soundscape of t h e knowledge to the problems of the modern city.13 Doctors warned of the danger modern city was no longer that noise posed to physical and mental health, while efficiency experts pro- dominated by t h e s o u n d s of claimed the deleterious effect of noise upon the nation's productivity, humans and a n i m a l s , but Concerned citizens pushed for antinoise legislation in an effort to impel what instead by the noises of mod- they considered appropriate behavior, to guarantee the public its right to an ern technology. Edward Brown et al., eds., City Noise environment free of unnecessary noise. The efforts and actions of these noise- (New York- Department of abaters, well covered in newspapers and magazines, drew increased attention to Health, 1930). the problem of noise. 1 18 CHAPTER 4 Not everyone recoiled from the soundscape of the modern city, however, and some were more constructively stimulated by the new sounds that surrounded them. Jazz musicians and avant-garde composers created new kinds of music directly inspired by the noises of the modern world. By doing so they tested long-standing definitions of musical sound, and they challenged listeners to reevaluate their own distinctions between music and noise. Some of these listeners met the challenge and embraced the new music, while others refused to listen. The problem of noise was further amplified in the 1920s by the actions of acoustical experts. Like the musicians, these men constructed new means for defining and dealing with noise in the modern world. For the first time, scientists and engineers were able to measure noise with electroacoustical instruments, and with this ability to measure came a powerful sense of mastery and control. Acousticians were eager to step into the public realm, to display their tools, and to demonstrate their expertise as they battled the wayward sounds. Their unprecedented ability to quantify the noise of the modern city further height- ened public awareness of the problem as well as expectation of its solution. That solution would prove elusive, however, as even the most technically proficient campaigns for noise abatement struggled to effect change within the public soundscape. By the end of the decade, urban dwellers were forced to retreat into private solutions to the problem of noise. Acoustical expertise was brought back indoors, and acousticians devoted themselves to the construction of soundproof buildings that offered refuge from the noise without. Thus, while noise has always been a companion to human activity, and while it has always been a source of complaint, the particular problem of noise in early-twentieth-century America was historically unique. The physical transformation of the soundscape, as well as the social and cultural transformations taking place within it, combined to create a culture in which noise became a defining element. Noise was now an essential aspect of the modern American experience. It generated an "intense American excitability;" it was an "American symptom."14 "There is nothing fanciful," the Saturday Review of Literature editori- alized, "in the assertion that the pitch of modern life is raised by the rhythmic noise that constantly beats upon us.

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