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Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933
The MIT Press
October 2004
On Sale: October 1, 2004
510 pages
ISBN: 0262701065
EAN: 9780262701068
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Winner of the 2005 Edelstein Prize sponsored by the Society
for the History of Technology (SHOT), Winner of the 2004
Marc-August Pictet Prize presented by The Société de
Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle (SPHN) de Genève, Winner of
the 2003 John Hope Franklin Book Award presented by the
American Studies Association, Winner of the 2002 Science
Writing Award in Acoustics for Journalists, presented by the
Acoustical Society of America and Winner of the 2003 Lewis
Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of
Technics, presented by the Media Ecology Association (MEA) In this history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century
America, Emily Thompson charts dramatic transformations in
what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was
a new kind of sound that was the product of modern
technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of
aural commodities. By examining the technologies that
produced this sound, as well as the culture that
enthusiastically consumed it, Thompson recovers a lost
dimension of the Machine Age and deepens our understanding
of the experience of change that characterized the era. Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and
acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as
Boston's Symphony Hall, New York's office skyscrapers, and
the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these
technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the
particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern
America began to sound alike as a universal new sound
predominated. Although this sound -- clear, direct,
efficient, and nonreverberant -- had little to say about the
physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes
about the culture that created it. By listening to it,
Thompson constructs a compelling new account of the
experience of modernity in America.
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