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| Nassau St. NY. 1926 |
Everyone knows that graduate students have plenty of time
for their life, their passions, their relax, and their significant others. Because
of this constant free time, I decided that I should not pay attention to the
syllabus and I picked the readings for the 12th of April, instead of the ones
for the 5th. Loyal to the spirit of the blog as a “reading” one, I
decided that today I will write about the Sound, hoping to be heard.
The article of Mark M. Smith “Sound—So What?,” published on
the November 2015 issue of The Public Historian[1]
represent a manifesto of the importance of adding sound in our discipline. The
scholar put his hear on the rail and explains how a new train of historians is
coming at full speed. Smith discusses about recent books and articles on this
argument demonstrating the possibilities offered by the new studies. These
opportunities rarely offer groundbreaking discoveries on the past, but surely
offer a more deep understanding of it.
One of the works analyzed by Smith is Emily Ann Thompson’s The
Soundscape of Modernity[2], a book that was actually our assignment
for the week (well not for this week…). A marvelous study on how the
perception and handling of sound changed in the first third of the twentieth
century, the book resounds too well with my personal interest in the history of
technology.
Indeed, science and
technology are of central importance in the book, because the concept of sound
changed only when from an expression felt from the senses, it became a physical
expression of the material world. Throughout her work, Thompson describes well
this transformation: from the alchemic understanding of a society used to feel,
but not describe empirically the sound, the discoveries in acoustic transformed
sound in something that had understandable qualities; this step cleared the
path for others, who used the modern instruments offered by the new
electronical devices to understand the interaction of sound and object. But
there is a very important aspect of the question that Thompson does not forget:
people felt the sound, had ideas on it, interacted with the possibilities and
the danger that it offered them: it is this kind of interaction that makes
history. This connection changed the society and provoked the transformations
of the world, from the noisy streets of the new metropolis to the pure beauty
of the Symphony Halls.
