I’ve got the phone in my hand. I open Twitter, merely as a tactic to delay the inevitable moment of getting out of bed. And suddenly it’s on: messages from friends overnight; news updates; links to articles I should read; tracks I should listen to; videos I should watch.

Two accounts. One private, the other public. And it’s on. A radio station of a thousand channels. I’m scanning them all. I’m still in bed. It’s 7.30 already. Fuck.

*

In 1741 the artist William Hogarth drew a tableau of utter frustration with the urban noise of London. The Enraged Musician is positively stuffed with representations of unpleasant sound: a woman peddles songsheets while holding a crying baby, a town crier bellows out the news, parrots squawk and dogs bark, while the general cacophony of commerce and human life, from buying and selling to pissing in the street, continues without pause. All the anxiety of the growing cities of the eighteenth century and the loss of rural farmland is there to see: a musician covers his ears and looks furiously at the madness in the street. No silence, no space to write, think or play music.

Things only got worse in the nineteenth century, with urban congestion causing a litany of complaints, preserved and amplified by the literati. Goethe complained about barking dogs, Schopenhauer loathed the sound of drivers cracking horsewhips and Thomas Carlyle was so appalled that he built a soundproof room at the top of his townhouse to escape the babble of the London streets.[2] Rapid industrialisation mean new noises: trains, steam whistles, the din of factories and horse-drawn trams. With each new phase of capitalism came a set of attendant noises and distractions, things that had to be blocked out or tolerated with gritted teeth. It was the sound of progress, and you could like it or leave. That is, if you were wealthy enough to have a summer house where you could escape the madding crowd.

With each new technological innovation came a claim for noise reduction. One of the strongest arguments for the removal of horse-drawn carriages with the automobile was sound: no more clanging of horseshoes against cobblestones and grinding of iron-wheeled carts.[3] Scientific American welcomed the car as the technology of tranquility: ‘The noise and clatter which makes conversation almost impossible on many streets of New York at the present time will be done away with, for horseless vehicles of all kinds are always noiseless or nearly so.’[4] Conversation was also a common source of complaint, as a source of street disturbance that would impinge on domestic spaces from the street and ruin concentration or rest. As one gentleman wrote of Venice in 1899, ‘the nearest motorized vehicle was far away, but sporadic outdoor conversation in the alley below my bedroom window … effectively murdered sleep’.[5]

Notes

2. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 116. Back

3. See Joel Tarr, ‘The Horse-Polluter of the City’, in his The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective, University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio, 1996, pp. 323–6. Back

4. Peter Coates, ‘The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise’, Environmental History, vol. 10, no. 4 (October 2005), p. 641. Back

5. ‘The Horseless Carriage and Public Health’, Scientific American, no. 80 (18 February 1899), p. 98. Back