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Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (Zone Books)
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About Making Noise: From Babel To The Big Bang And Beyond
Product Description Listening across millennia, a cultural historian explores the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical―and intriguing―as the original Babel. 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. Review "An explosion of a book … all facets of life come alive with sounds good, bad, and ugly … readable and absorbing in both sweep and detail." ― Times Higher Education "Schwartz is a writer’s writer, meaning that he is a sublime stylist, can turn a phrase you’ll never forget and knows he is being read by, inter alia, other writers." ― RealTime Review “Never has so much clarity accompanied so much noise. Hillel Schwartz, a scholar’s scholar channeled by a sagacious and gracious poet, has taken noise from boing to being, from abstractions imposed upon the seemingly insignificant, chaotic, and unruly to a dynamic centrality of actual lives lived and imagined, of physical and political forces. To the extent that noise is audible, Making Noise is the greatest achievement yet produced in the scholarship on sound and listening. To the extent that noise is so much more, Schwartz is the Humboldt of a disorderly Cosmos.”― Douglas Kahn, author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts “The society that wishes to move the fastest ― not necessarily the most expeditiously ― must assimilate enormous quantities of information and sort it out at lightning speed. Along with useful information comes disinformation ― human, mechanical, and random error. The brain sorts through this data constantly at large cost. A state of tensile strength at extreme pressure requires only one small cut in the wire to boomerang. Philosopher, cyclist, and innovator in the case management of the acutely ill, Hillel Schwartz has spent twenty years researching the exponentiating phenomenon of ‘noise.’ With unparalleled research, he explores every parameter of this term and its effect upon psyche and physiology. Noise blasts a human being into infinity and he lands in an iron chair without a nametag, an overwounded fleshmachine melted down into an unrecognizable form.”― Diamanda Galás, composer, vocalist, and performance artist “We might easily imagine that noise doesn’t have a history, that it’s ju
