If the best-known recent works in the field of sound studies have a common denominator, it is that sound, hearing, and listening must be understood in historical and cultural context. Authors such as Jonathan Sterne and Emily Thompson tune out phenomenological generalizations about the nature of auditory experience and dial down the alarm sounded by acoustic ecologists, who claim that auditory experience has been degraded by the “schizophonia” of visual technoculture. These scholars point to the historicity of aurality and its embeddedness in the ideas and practices that surround listening in any given milieu. Our experience of sound hasn’t simply changed because of the radio, phonograph, and architectural innovations—these technologies are themselves the result of modern ways of listening and thinking about sound.
Karin Bijsterveld’s Mechanical Sound is a substantial contribution to this contemporary constructivist approach to sound. Taking noise as her central problematic, she demonstrates sound’s historicity by revealing the modern “noise problem” to be a moving target, one that has been perceived, framed, and combated in different ways since industrialization. As both a sound historian and a Science and Technology Studies scholar working with STS leading lights such as Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch, Bijsterveld is well positioned to mine the co-constructed nature of sound, technology, and culture. However, she also draws from a remarkably diverse range of theory in anthropology, sociology, public problems, literature, cultural geography, and philosophy of the senses to evaluate the history of noise complaints, laws, and responses. In doing so, she produces not only an illuminating history but also an illuminating example of how to do what she calls “a sound history of technological culture” (240). Sound scholars will probably be Mechanical Sound’s closest readers, but scholars from the aforementioned disciplines with an interest in social issues and technology will benefit from Bijsterveld’s approach to the problematic of noise.
Bijsterveld’s central question is why noise has remained a persistent and potentially unsolvable problem since the advent of industrialization. Using the social problems theory of Joseph Gusfeld as a starting point for her analysis, she examines the ways that noise has been “dramatized” as a public problem over the years. The author presents a schema of “repertoires of dramatizing sound” she induces from an archive of literary references to sound created by R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project. Having located four “auditory topoi of technology,” she explains how early anti-noise organizations and industry stakeholders variously dramatized mechanical sounds as intrusive, sinister, sensational, or comforting. Bijsterveld’s contention is that the rhetoric of anti-noise activists failed to match the problem, leading to public inaction.
In one example, physicians and industrial hygienists made no headway in getting industrial workers to wear earplugs, because they failed to understand the positive cultural meanings the workers attributed to the sounds that were deafening them. Controlling a noisy machine signified power and masculinity on the shop floor; in addition, the sounds made by machines often provided clues to their proper functioning. Thus, physicians’ attempts to dramatize hearing protection as a responsibility to one’s self was antithetical to the culture and social relations of the shop floor, in which noise was dramatized as positive (76–80).
Other examples, however, lead Bijsterveld to conclude that even success in framing noise as a public problem can be counterproductive, since it constrains the options subsequently available (235). This focus on constraint takes Bijsterveld beyond the claim that technologies and cultures of sound are mutually constructive—she details a historical process in which the public discourses and “solutions” of one era’s noise problem contain the seeds of the next era’s woes. This historical trajectory, Bijsterveld argues, has led to two ill-adapted forms of public policy. Spatial strategies, such as zoning, stem from early efforts to create “quiet zones” around hospitals and schools; over time, noise ordinances have created complex maps of inequality in noise exposure, a strategy guaranteed to perpetuate noise problems. Secondly, Bijsterveld theorizes “a paradox of control” in noise legislation where “citizens have been made responsible for dealing with the most intangible forms of noise abatement (the ones based on talking others into quieter behavior), and have been distanced from the most tangible ones,” such as zoning and decibel-level ordinances (254). Thus, a person living near an airport may be greatly impacted by a “small” statutory change to allowed decibel levels, zoning, or airplane flight patterns—changes with political and technological bases that are opaque to the average citizen.
Clearly, there is much here of interest for those involved in public policy, acoustic ecology, and urban planning. Bijsterveld’s book may be valuable to anyone in the humanities with an interest in sound. Mechanical Sound is a marvelous mix of methodological eclecticism and rigor, one that channels history into a critique of cultural and scholarly understandings of noise and perception. Ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and anthropologists of the senses will want to engage her critiques of common tropes about noise’s roots in mobile-visual culture and the subjectivity of hearing. In such arguments, she is firmly in Sterne’s camp and, like him, she may occasionally attack a straw man. For example, not all who see a visual bias in Western culture “consider the ear the morally better sense” as Bijsterveld suggests (239–40). Such a claim only distracts from her interesting evidence that the visuality of street signs and traffic lights stems from automobile noise complaints, suggesting a mutual influence between sound and vision in modernity. Rich with examples and arguments such as these, Mechanical Sound is likely to find its way onto many a sound scholar’s shelf.
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[Review length: 917 words • Review posted on July 1, 2010]