The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 [Hardcover]

Emily Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2002

In this history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century America, Emily Thompson charts dramatic transformations in what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. By examining the technologies that produced this sound, as well as the culture that enthusiastically consumed it, Thompson recovers a lost dimension of the Machine Age and deepens our understanding of the experience of change that characterized the era.Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston's Symphony Hall, New York's office skyscrapers, and the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern America began to sound alike as a universal new sound predominated. Although this sound--clear, direct, efficient, and nonreverberant--had little to say about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes about the culture that created it. By listening to it, Thompson constructs a compelling new account of the experience of modernity in America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a pioneering study of America's culture of listening, University of Pennsylvania professor of the history and sociology of science Emily Thompson depicts a culture busily rationalizing, quantifying and taming sound in The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900 1933. Beginning with the extraordinary (and little known) career of architectural engineer Wallace Sabine, from his felt-covered acoustical correction of the Rhode Island House of Representatives to his role in the influential design of Boston's Symphony Hall, Thompson analyzes the checkered (and ultimately futile) history of noise abatement and the implications of the introduction of electronics. Her account culminates in the design and construction of Rockefeller Center, and is powered throughout by the utopianism of the scientists, architects and engineers she depicts.
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Review

"This book takes on entirely new territory in the still-emerging scholarship on our aural history and does so with panache and clarity. It is an exemplar of how the history of technology and culture should be done." Susan Douglas, Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor, University of Michigan

"A good book opens your eyes; this one opens your ears as well."--Stuart W. Leslie, Department of the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, The Johns Hopkins University

"A good book opens your eyes; this one opens your ears as well." Stuart W. Leslie, Department of the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, Johns Hopkins University

"...an absorbing book, as accessible in its technical content as it is provocative in its cultural interpretations." Daniel J. Kevles The New York Review of Books

"...enlivened by copious photographs and architectural illustrations - a valuable source." Tom Perchard The Wire (UK)

"The Soundscape of Modernity describes the modern development of acoustics in wonderful, and easily understood, detail." John Bishop The American Organist

"This is a marvelous book and a seminal primer on how and why technology modified our taste." Derek Sugden The Architectural Review

"Thompson's narrative is elegantly written and wonderfully engaging." Leon Botstein Los Angeles Times Book Review

" The Soundscape of Modernity describes the modern development of acoustics in wonderful and easily understood detail." John Bishop The American Organist

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 510 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1st edition (April 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262201380
• ISBN-13: 978-0262201384
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 8.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #360,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sounding the History of Acoustics, October 1, 2002

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Hardcover)

Those invited to read an academic book on acoustics might well decline because of a headache, or an urgent need to wash the cat, or the constant press of quality daytime television. It would be hard to convince them that such a book could be exciting, or even interesting, especially if it weighs in with the heft of a textbook. But a remarkable work by historian Emily Thompson, _The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900 - 1933_, ought to be enjoyed by non-specialists and those who know nothing about the science of acoustics. Thompson has written a comprehensive, well-referenced, but witty and entertaining book about an important subject whose influence is surprisingly pervasive.

Thompson briskly reviews acoustic history; before this century, listeners knew there were better auditoriums and worse, but no one really knew why. To create a new venue for the important Boston Symphony Orchestra, the architect consulted a young Harvard assistant professor of physics, Wallace Sabine, who may be dubbed the Father of American Acoustics. In 1895, Sabine had been asked by the president of Harvard to improve the terrible acoustics of the lecture hall in the new Fogg Art Museum. In studying the problem, Sabine learned that the important thing to measure within a hall was the time of reverberation, the dying out of sound echoing through the room. This seems obvious now, but was the founding insight for all subsequent acoustical thought. He developed an equation relating the absorbing power of the room and its furnishings to the reverberation time. When Boston's Symphony Hall opened in 1900, the acoustics were an overwhelming success with critics. There were carpers who gradually dissented from the praise, but the musicians and the audiences became familiar with the sound, and its reputation remains high. Making beautiful sounds is but one aspect of acoustics treated in Thompson's book. Chapters are also devoted to the shielding from ugly sounds which the machine age was producing. Legal remedies for noise were largely unsuccessful, but there were brilliant successes in architectural use of sound-absorbing material to keep out the din. Movies changed the way auditoriums sounded, and making them presented its own peculiar problems. They had to have their camera sounds deadened and their studio lots coated to damp echoes, and the air conditioning (necessitated because the noisy carbon arc lighting had been replaced by quieter but hotter incandescent) had to be acoustically insulated from the production.

Thompson ends her fascinating study with the Radio City Music Hall, a progeny of the new electroacoustic science. The hall was designed for the capture of sound by stage microphones and the projection of amplified sound into the highly absorbent and cavernous hall. The system worked very well, but ironically, although the audience could hear every speaker as if they were close to the stage, only those physically close could see with equal clarity. Live spectaculars failed, and the hall became a white elephant, playing mostly movies that people could see cheaper elsewhere. But the theatrical amplification of sound became a standard; as the century wore on, theaters were designed to be "tunable" to sound gothic, baroque, or modern, without one "best" setting. The soundscape we have become used to will continue to change, but Thompson's volume, full of clear, small essays and biographies, and cheerfully laced with humor and unobtrusive puns, is an insightful description of the origins of the sounds of the future.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Impacts of the ideals of modernity, January 23, 2003

By 

J. Moore (Atlanta, Ga. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Hardcover)

Thompson focuses on the role of modernist tendencies in the construction and commodification of the auditory culture of America in the early twentieth century. She looks not only at the science of architectural acoustics but their linkage to the new recording technologies and general changes in the aural landscape of New York and elsewhere. We discover the completeness of the modernist retreat from the world into skyscrapers which had among their attributes the ability to silence all the outside noise of life. Thompson displays how the perception and creation of sound is absolutely coupled to a culture and its historicity. By doing so she links herself to the great French historian of the senses, Alain Corbin, who wrote Village Bells and allowed us to rediscover the sounds of the eighteenth French countryside and the culture that created it. To read a work written in such a provocative and entertaining way is a wonderful experience and to have such an experience with a book that centers around a topic as possibly dull as architectural acoustics is doubly impressive. As more talented historians are "coming out of the woodwork" and lending their abilities to the study of aurality our picture of the world past is quickly becoming a more vivid and less silent one.
Secondly, I fell the need to comment on one reviewer's critique. One, though F Murray Schafer may have helped create a new field of study and generated concern for a the loss of a particular kind of soundscape I think criticizing an entire book because you have a semantic disagreement about the title with the author is slightly ridiculous. Thompson states her differences with Schafer in the first couple hundred words. I personally find Schafer's writing quite lacking in theoretical vigor and drawing on questionable statistical evidence. Secondly, Thompson does in fact go well beyond just discussing the technical "progress" made in the field of acoustics by looking at the reasons that a culture would look to alter its sound in the first place.
A fantastic book. I hope she writes more.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and innovative approach to the history of architectural acoustics, January 15, 2006

By 

Betsy Sundalius "Engineering Graduate Student" (Battle Creek, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Paperback)

The way that this book approaches the history of sound in the early twentieth-century is truly unique. Thompson catalogs the events from 1900-1933 from four different perspectives, each perspective in its own chapter. The explanation of the science involved in the evolution in sound is done extremely well; easily understandable to the non-technical person, and yet with enough detail to satisfy the technically minded. I am an engineering student and bought this book for a project for my noise control engineering class-a graduate level class-and it provided extremely useful to me in describing how the scientific community changed and evolved in the area of acoustics.

So many differently things were happening all at once during this time period. Books that focus solely on science and the scientific community totally disregard the social atmosphere that drove the scientific community to achieve as they did. Also, any social history would be remiss in omitting the contributions of the scientific community in a time period where science was celebrated and embraced by society. Thompson does a wonderful job of showing the history of both areas and how they interrelate to one another.

What follows is a brief outline of what the book includes and how it is presented:
Thomspon uses architecture, and the science of acoustics used to aid in design, as milestones in the development of what she refers to as the 'soundscape'. She begins with opening night at Symphony Hall in Boston on October 15, 1900, and ends with Radio City Music Hall, which opened December 27, 1932.

The introduction and brief overview is given in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 begins with opening night of Symphony Hall and how the work of Wallace Sabine impacted the design of music hall. It also gives a brief history of earlier attempts at sound control, which illustrates just how significant Sabine's work was for both the scientific and architectural community. Chapters 3 through 6 each cover the time period 1900 to 1933 from four different perspectives.

Chapter 3 follows the work of the scientists throughout this period who, by building on the work of Sabine, focused their careers in the study of sound and developing the science of "New Acoustics". The chapter catalogs the development of the new tools available to accurately measure sound, new techniques to measure sound and the new language used to define sound.

During this time period, the sounds of a city dramatically changed from human sources to mechanical sources. This created new challenges in noise control, which had previously been addressed by controlling the behavior of the people causing the noise. This type of noise control became obsolete once mechanical noise became prevalent. Chapter 4 addresses these changes and how the public dealt with the changes in the problem and meaning of noise.

Chapter 5 restarts the period again, this time focusing on how the technology of architectural acoustics, the science that Sabine basically invented with his groundbreaking work outlined in Chapter 1 & 2, was used indoors to alleviate the problem of noise. This chapter follows the new acoustical material industry which was focused on new building technologies dedicated to isolating and absorbing sound. It tracks scientific knowledge being applied to create sound-engineered buildings, which were designed to keep noise out of a building, and how this eventually became known as 'modern noise control'.

Chapter 6 shows how the electro acoustical technology moved out of the lab, where it was developed to measure sound, into the world. Microphones, loudspeakers, radios, public address systems and sound motion pictures were all world applications of the lab technology which filled the soundscape with electro acoustical signals. It also shows the rapid change in the soundscape that this new electric acoustic sound bears little resemblance to the sound of 1900. So little resemblance that Sabine's reverberation formula failed to describe it, forcing the equation to be revised, signaling the final transformation of the soundscape.

Chapter 7 finishes off the time period with the opening of Radio City Music Hall.