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

Rating:
Summary: The Soundscape of Modernity
Review: "The Soundscape of Modernity," is the title of Emily Thompson's book. However, it has little to do with soundscapes or modernity and everything to do with the less-sexy sub-title (in very small print), "Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1033."

Despite the author's attempts to re-define R. M. Schafer's meaning of "soundscapes," she fails to connect the thrust of her exposition to the more resonant and common significance of the term and thus obscures and distorts the meaning of both the term and concept. The author confines her discussion to changes of the performance, creation, and perception of sound in our culture during the first third of the last century due largely to the engineering and construction of interior architectural spaces and related supporting technologies. Unless one can successfully bestow on the interior of Boston's Symphony Hall or the Radio City Music Hall the rational equivalent of soundscape (aural) as landscape (visual), one cannot expect to make the transition and apply the term "soundscape" to the acoustic result of those designs with any authority. It simply doesn't fit. The book, in the end, speaks nothing of soundscapes as they have come to be understood in the arts and sciences, but addresses, instead, architectural acoustics and the technologies that drive and/or enhance them. While the text is readable and historically loaded with informative discussion on the transformation of architectural acoustics, it is not consistent with the expectations contained in the title of this book.

I bought the book because the title suggested an illumination on the manner in which soundscapes - human and natural - changed during the first three decades of the 20th century. It delivered, instead, a very different, misleading, but nonetheless instructive narrative. As my interest in the work was more along the lines of that anticipation, I was somewhat disappointed especially because the book is so expensive.

Rating:
Summary: Impacts of the ideals of modernity
Review: 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 criticize 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. If it was that upsetting, just take the book back. 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.

Rating:
Summary: Impacts of the ideals of modernity
Review: 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 criticize 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. If it was that upsetting, just take the book back. 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.

Rating:
Summary: Sounding the History of Acoustics
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Sounding the History of Acoustics
Review: 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.