Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity.
Thompson examines how architectural spaces both shaped and were shaped by sound and its perception in American culture from 1900-1933. In the early twentieth century, she claims, advances in acoustics worked to eliminate space’s effect on or interference with sound’s transmission. Hence, sound was increasingly dissociated from space and reconceived as signal. Thompson argues that the early twentieth century’s soundscapes were distinctly modern because they were efficient (working to eliminate noise to clarify signal) and commodified, while also boasting of of “man’s technical mastery over his physical environment” (4). The Soundscapes of Modernity traces cultural shifts in sound and sound perception through the rise of acoustics as a field and its influence on architectural design. The concept of noise and the redefinition of “good” and “bad” sound lies at the heart of these changes. Thompson explores how jazz musicians and avant-garde composers recuperated noise, challenging assumptions about noise’s distinction from music. Contemporaneously, though, architectural acoustics worked to alleviate the problem of noise; “sound-proofed” space became a commodity that allowed for the unhindered production of clear, controlled signals through loudspeakers, microphones, and other similar technologies. This trend, Thompson notes, is inseparable from the corporatization of American culture: “sound control was a business” (171).
Thompson’s work on sound in twentieth-century America may seem irrelevant to my work on sound in nineteenth-century Britain. And yet, I often find works on sound in modernity just as (if not more) compelling because such scholarship often posits a shift away from something quintessentially Victorian. Theses about “modern” sound always leave me wondering: how did the nineteenth-century create the grounds for these changes? Which of the cultural attitudes Thompson identifies seem radically different from attitudes toward sound in the nineteenth-century? Which do not? Many nineteenth-century sound scholars, for example, have argued that the phonograph commodified sound long before modern acoustics. Anyone familiar with Dickens’s elaborate set design and acoustics testing for his public Readings knows that Victorians too sought technical mastery over their environments by eliminating noise and clarifying “signal.” This is not to say that Thompson isn’t right in her theorization of the “soundscapes of modernity”—just that one should not uncritically accept her chosen period, 1900-1933, as the unprecedented inauguration of the shifts she identifies. Consequently, her study will be useful to me as I consider the influence of acoustics and sound design as it relates to voice projection in reading and speaking.
