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

Emily Thompson: September 26, 2002; Running Time: 01:19:50

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

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, and the way they listened was 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. The Soundscape of Modernity is published by The MIT Press, 2002, and is available from the Press at http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262201380.

Selected Bibliography of Works in Aural History

Attali, Jaques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. 1977; Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 1985.

Corbin, Alain. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th Century French Countryside. 1994; NY: Colombia Univ. Press, 1998.

Douglas, Susan. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. NY: Times Books, 1999.

Johnson, James. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1995.

Kahn, Douglas. Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.

Picker, John. "The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise," Victorian Studies 42 (Spring 1999/2000): 427-453.

Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Turning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.

Schmidt, Leigh. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000.

Smith, Bruce. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.

Smith, Mark. "Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America," Journal of the Historical Society 1 (Spring 2000): 65-99.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Raleigh-Durham: Duke Univ. Press, Forthcoming January 2003.

Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.

Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication. 2d. ed. Westport, CT.: Ablex, 2001.

Lecture Details

Location: E25-111

About the Speaker

Emily Thompson

Senior Fellow, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, MIT

Emily Thompson is Senior Fellow, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, MIT. She is also co-editor, with Peter Galison, of The Architecture of Science (MIT, 1999). She is currently studying the role of technicians in the transformation to sound film in the American motion picture industry in the late 1920s.