Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond

by Hillel Schwartz

When did the "silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud? How loud is too loud, and says who? Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise. From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback, from shouts frozen in Rabelaisian air to the squawk of loudspeakers and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows "unwanted sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic and industrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage, readers can hear the cultural reverberations of the historical soundwork of actresses, admen, anthropologists, astronomers, builders, composers, dentists, economists, engineers, filmmakers, firemen, grammar school teachers, jailers, nurses, oceanographers, pastors, philosophers, poets, psychologists, and the writers of children's books.Drawing upon such diverse sources as the archives of antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks and dental drills, letters and daybooks of physicists and physicians, military manuals and training films, travel diaries and civil defense pamphlets, as well as museum collections of bells, ear trumpets, megaphones, sirens, stethoscopes, and street organs, Schwartz traces the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel.

Endnotes and bibliography are not included in the physical book but are available online at the MIT Press Web site.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

912 pages, Hardcover

First published November 4, 2011

Reviews

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant explication of the social history of noise. Noise of all kinds, from the ambient sounds of the city, to the murmurs from under the sea and from out in the cosmos. Visual noise, static, stochastic processes, whale songs, street criers, the moans and groans of sex, military noise, noise in the lab, noise in prisons, the sounds of animals, and, of course, those things that go bump in the night all make an appearance.

It's dense, obsessive, and filled with arcane details and witty digressions. Hillel Schwartz seems to have read and synthesized everything on the topic, from technical scientific papers to the rantings of cranks. The prose is rather florid -- the author suggests that book be read aloud -- and the richness of the text forms its own kind of noise. Unlike, for example, Foucault's History of Madness, which this book superficially resembles, Schwartz isn't grinding a thesis but rather reveling in his topic, like a jazz musician riffing on a theme. The book is a pure pleasure.

[Mira · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in a way. It involved me opening random pages and having an amazed look on my face. Then I gave it to my sister for her birthday. But seriously, Schwartz does the same thing he did with Culture of the Copy, with images and analogue and facsimiles. He dredges up information from who knows where and creates this crazy huge web of human facts, science, imagery, experience, literature, music, cinema, biology, archeology. The man is some kinda sponge.

[michaelben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only just started this book, so my rating is preliminary. But so far it is an amazing piece of writing. Epic in scope; thoughtful; clever; humorous; poetic.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

My full review is in the journal Interference, here:

http://www.interferencejournal.com/ar...