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

Emily Thompson - emilyt@princeton.edu
Department of History, Princeton University
Princeton NJ, 08544

Popular version of paper 2pAAb1
Presented Tuesday afternoon, June 5, 2007
153 rd ASA Meeting, Salt Lack City, UT

In this illustrated history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century America, I chart dramatic transformations in what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound, the product of modern technologies. They listened as newly critical consumers of sonic commodities. By examining the technologies that produced this sound, as well as the culture that so enthusiastically consumed it, I recover a lost dimension of the Machine Age and deepen our understanding of the experience of change that characterized this era of American history.

Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical ceiling tiles were all deployed in places as varied as Boston’s Symphony Hall, New York’s office skyscrapers, and the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern America began to sound alike as a universal new sound predominated. Although this new modern sound - clear, direct, efficient, and nonreverberant - had little to say about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes about the culture that created it. By listening to it, I will construct a compelling account of the experience of modernity in America, 1900-1933.