“Never has so much clarity accompanied so much noise. Hillel Schwartz, a scholar’s scholar channeled by a sagacious and gracious poet, has taken noise from boing to being, from abstractions imposed upon the seemingly insignificant, chaotic, and unruly to a dynamic centrality of actual lives lived and imagined, of physical and political forces. To the extent that noise is audible, Making Noise is the greatest achievement yet produced in the scholarship on sound and listening. To the extent that noise is so much more, Schwartz is the Humboldt of a disorderly Cosmos.”― Douglas Kahn, author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts

“The society that wishes to move the fastest ― not necessarily the most expeditiously ― must assimilate enormous quantities of information and sort it out at lightning speed. Along with useful information comes disinformation ― human, mechanical, and random error. The brain sorts through this data constantly at large cost. A state of tensile strength at extreme pressure requires only one small cut in the wire to boomerang. Philosopher, cyclist, and innovator in the case management of the acutely ill, Hillel Schwartz has spent twenty years researching the exponentiating phenomenon of ‘noise.’ With unparalleled research, he explores every parameter of this term and its effect upon psyche and physiology. Noise blasts a human being into infinity and he lands in an iron chair without a nametag, an overwounded fleshmachine melted down into an unrecognizable form.”― Diamanda Galás, composer, vocalist, and performance artist

“We might easily imagine that noise doesn’t have a history, that it’s just, well, sound. But Making Noise reveals that a shifting soundtrack to human life has been an inevitable consequence of social change. New social arrangements and new technologies lead, not just to new sounds, but to new ideas about which sounds are normal, necessary, or pleasant, and which are noxious or dangerous. Hillel Schwartz draws upon an extraordinary range of sources to tell the story of noise with great style and wit. Listen up!”― Joel Best, author of Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture

“Think of Hillel Schwartz’s tome as The Book of Noise: not just a, but the history of the hum and thrum of the world. It arrives as if from a dream, a materialization of one of Borges’s imaginary and impossible volumes, a book that contains all creation―and all its clattering contradictions besides. Schwartz takes readers past the swerves of science to the ends of art, tracking how noise has become the elemental apparatus of the universe as well as the troubled twin to sense and sentiment. Making Noise resounds and astounds.”― Stefan Helmreich, author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas