[12] December 12 — Our most abused sense: Noise, nerves, and the modern city

Assigned reading:

Arthur Schopenhauer, "On noise" (1851). (German) (Russian)

Daniel Morat, “The Sound of a New Era: On the Transformation of Auditory and Urban Experience in the Long Fin de Siècle, 1880–1930,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 7 (2019).

Further reading:

Emily Thompson, “Making Noise in The Roaring ’Twenties: Sound and Aural History on the Web,” The Public Historian 37, no. 4 (2015): 91–110.

James G. Mansell, "Neurasthenia, civilization, and the sounds of modern life: Narratives of nervous illness in the interwar campaign against noise," in Sounds in Modern History, 278-302.

Bruce Johnson, "Sites of sound," Oral Tradition 24 (2009).

Shannon Mattern and Barry Salmon, “Sound Studies: Framing Noise,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2008): 139–44.

Peter Payer, “The Age of Noise: Early Reactions in Vienna, 1870—1914,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 5 (2007): 773–93.

John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (2003).

[click on image for source]

Caption: (Professor Ostwald has proposed to align [syntonize] – car horns, bicycle bells, street tram clappers, etc. – to a particular key for the protection of nervous dispositions.)

“Man, don’t whistle in D-minor! Now you’re part of the street noise, you have to whistle in C-major!”