"Historians are the helots of academe," my grad-school advisor used to say. Take advantage of all that labor, he urged—you won’t believe what they’ve managed to find till you take a look.
Or a listen. Historian Emily Thompson's book The Soundscape of Modernity (MIT Press, 2002)is a work of mind-blowing ideas about sound, based on research in mind-numbing detail about architectural acoustics. There is more in that book about ceiling tile than anyone should need to know, and yet… I treasure the knowledge, because what Thompson does with it changed my listening forever. And I am far from lonely in my admiration for the book—it helped launch the now-booming academic field of sound studies, and earned its author a MacArthur fellowship.
Recently, Thompson put her efforts into building The Roaring Twenties, a website that documents the sounds of New York City in the early 20th century. Less a work of analysis than a mass of painstakingly organized detail—the helot’s hard drive—it is now available for our collective exploration. Newsreels, newspaper clippings, and city documents relating to noise are not only cross-referenced, but physically overlaid on one another via a map, a chronology, and a chart of all the city’s noises by type. In a statement for Vectors Journal, publishers of the site, Thompson explains:
"The aim here is not just to present sonic content, but to evoke the original contexts of those sounds, to help us better understand that context as well as the sounds themselves. The goal is to recover the meaning of sound, to undertake a historicized mode of listening that tunes our modern ears to the pitch of the past. Simply clicking a 'play' button will not do."
To those of us who click play buttons all day long, this is quite a throwdown. The internet has brought us into easy contact with so many sounds, but typically at the price of divorcing them from context. LPs gave us liner notes (or at least credits and an image to stare at) and CDs provided booklets that framed the music in some way. But mp3s and streaming files are lonely things, usually identified only by artist and title. Leaks and other sub-legal downloads might not even come with those (at least not spelled correctly).
Is this loss of context contributing to a loss of meaning for music, as Thompson implies for the noises she documents? Noise and music are not always the same, but to the historian they certainly can be: "Musical Instruments" is one of the categories of sounds on The Roaring Twenties, as is "Radio and Music Shops" (don’t miss the fantastic newsreel footage of Radio Row on Cortland Street, where all the shops broadcast different music into the street simultaneously). Context, or Thompson’s "historicized mode of listening," would seem to be precisely what we are losing by listening online.
Still, if you are not a helot of academe, a critic making use of their labor, or an obsessive record collector, dehistoricized listening may suit you fine. But Thompson's project reminds us of the thrill and the importance of context—a concept that might not just be confined to the academy. After all, the LP and the cassette are both experiencing revivals, and maybe it's partly because they reintroduce history to the sounds they convey.