an interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City http://nycitynoise.com http://vectors.usc.edu/xml/projects/theroaringtwenties_v1.xml http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/backgrounds/theroaringtwenties.jpg inc/css/screen_highcontrast.css projects/icons/thompson.jpg 0 0 0 0 0 0 Its data is mined through the time-honored techniques of the historian in the archive, through human filtering and detailed close readings. Our time machines thus ultimately and necessarily return us to our selves, and the sonic time machine that is The Roaring 'Twenties is no exception. 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. [NOTE: Due to Adobe's deprecation of Flash, the original version of this project no longer works. A revised version, however, is available.]

A visitor to my home in Los Angeles recently commented on the noisiness of my neighborhood. I was surprised by this, as I tend to think of my slice of LA as a fairly quiet one. I then began to listen with more care, and sounds I had grown accustomed to came gradually into focus: traffic moving along a nearby busy street, an occasional siren or helicopter, even the howls of the coyotes camped out by the reservoir. Still, I thought to myself, it is not like New York. As much as I love that city, I am always surprised by how loud it is and have learned to ask for hotel rooms far above street level. The cacophony is at once energizing and exhausting. In The Roaring 'Twenties, Emily Thompson reminds us that it is also deeply historical and contextual.

Thompson is a historian of sound, a member of a burgeoning community of scholars who turns our collective attention to the aural landscape, interrogating the materiality and texture of our sonic worlds. In many ways, The Roaring 'Twenties serves as an extension of Thompson's groundbreaking 2002 book, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, but this piece extends that earlier work into new sensory registers and toward new audiences. The project proceeds from a deeply archival impulse. It richly draws from the Municipal Archives of the City of New York, cataloging over 600 unique complaints about noise around 1930 while reproducing over 350 pages of these materials. It also includes fifty-four excerpts of Fox Movietone newsreels, early sound experiments that at once captured and technologically remediated the sounds of New York City, as well as hundreds of other photographs and print materials. Thus, this project brings together a large array of data, but it does not deploy the now-trendy logic of distant reading. Its data is mined through the time-honored techniques of the historian in the archive, through human filtering and detailed close readings. Presented here through a stylized multimedia interface, the piece invites its user to linger with the artifacts and to listen and read with care. The pleasures of this database are not about speed and the algorithm but about a slow and deliberate attention.

The visitor to the piece can navigate along three pathways that organize the site's content via the rubrics of space, time, and sound, each offering a unique vantage point on the database that drives the project. When navigating the spatial pathway, the user can zoom into the various boroughs of the city, locating historical noise complaints throughout the fabric of the metropolitan region. When doing so, the vintage facade of the site is sometimes ruptured, allowing the twenty-first-century styling of Google Maps to burst momentarily onto screen. Similarly, the multi-hued Google logo sits brightly in the lower left corner of the map. These slight temporal ruptures are useful ones, serving as they do to remind us that access to the past is always mediated through the technologies and inquiries of the present, even as it's quite engaging to dwell in the sounds of years gone by.]]> The Soundscape of Modernity. The book is a history of the intersection of the evanescent and the concrete. Throughout its narrative, the ephemeral vibrations of sound interact with a material world intended to control those vibrations. When I wrote Soundscape, I was interested in historicizing the act of listening as much as the things people heard or the tools they deployed to hear those things. One of the points I hoped to emphasize was the newness of the idea, as well as the technological reality, of sound separated from the material space in which it was created. Both the idea and its realization were the fruition of a distinctly modern way of thinking about sound, space, and technology that culminated in the early twentieth century.

When the book first appeared in 2002, I was often asked why I didn't issue a companion CD filled with audio recordings of the sounds of the spaces I wrote about, including Symphony Hall in Boston, and St. Thomas's Church and Radio City Music Hall in New York City. While I hope I always responded politely, in fact, the question kind of annoyed me. I felt that it missed the whole point of the book, which was to historicize - and thus not to take for granted - the idea that the sound of a specific place could be technologically captured, dislocated from its origins and relocated somewhere else, for example onto a compact disc and hence into any listener's living room (which was primarily where one listened to CD audio recordings way back in 2002).

Now, all these years later, I find myself doing the very thing that I resisted when my book was published, but with the benefit of a technology far more powerful than compact discs at transcending the traditional connections between sound and place. In the past decade, the meaning of space - actual, physical, inhabitable space - has been so fully upended by a culture built upon interconnected technologies of data distribution that the material embodiment of sound etched onto the discrete surface of a compact disc now seems as ancient a relic as the neo-Gothic statuary within St. Thomas's Church. People today listen to recorded sound anywhere and everywhere, and many engage in modes of listening that not only dissociate the sounds they hear from their places of origin, but also render themselves oblivious to the spaces in which they are physically located while they listen. The time now seems ripe to deploy these technological tools in a different direction; to use the distribution, organization, and presentation of data to reinvoke a sense of the very specific historical times and physical places in which the sounds of the past were embedded.

By offering a website dedicated to the sounds of New York City circa 1930, The Roaring 'Twenties is following the lead of countless other individuals and organizations who have turned the web into a vast sonic archive, delivering a previously unimaginable wealth of historic sound recordings to anyone with a connection and a desire to listen in. With The Roaring 'Twenties, I hope we not only add to that archive, but also set an example by doing so in an explicitly historically-minded way. 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.

How our website attempts to achieve this goal is outlined more fully in the Introduction built into the site itself. In this more personal set-up, I want instead to elaborate briefly upon a second goal, one that addresses - perhaps appropriately for a website about listening - the issue of audience. In constructing The Roaring 'Twenties, we consciously kept multiple audiences in mind and we aimed to speak to a range of different groups through our design. The audiences we imagined range from the scholarly to the general: from academics currently engaged with investigations in sound studies, sensory history, and urban history; to students of all ages; to members of the general public who perhaps live in, grew up in, or are simply interested in, the neighborhoods of New York. If we have done our job well and taken full advantage of the generous opportunity that the Vectors' editors provided, the history buff as well as the history professor should find meaning in the site and its content should stimulate personal responses as readily as it does more intellectually objective inquiries. If our ambitions have exceeded our accomplishments, perhaps the site can serve as a lesson for others, to help them realize more fully the rich potential of the web for public history and sensory history.]]>
We focused on presenting the materials primarily through a spatial interface. NYC's landscape was quickly being transformed at this time, and that transformation produced an array of new and unique sounds emanating from specific locations. We wanted to plot these locations in an interface that reflected the era, so Emily searched for a map of the city from that period. She discovered a 6-foot-high, historical map of New York City on eBay. She had the digital team at Princeton scan the entire map, piece by piece, until it was completely digitized at high resolution. I then took this digitized image and broke it down into "tiles" that could be used by the Google maps API. To enable seven different zoom levels within Google maps, we ended up with over 19,000 different tile images that are then reconstructed on the fly as you zoom and navigate spatially within the map interface.

The other interfaces take the same archival material and organize them in different ways through sound and time. The presentation of the materials in these different but related ways allows a more complete picture of the era to be formed and a deeper understanding of it to emerge for the user.

As one explores the rich archive contained in this piece, the personal experiences of the characters within begin to come alive - from the passionate pleas expressed in beautifully handwritten letters, to the lengthy exchanges with commissioner Wynne, to the wide array of noises complained about including loud neighbors, "maniacal laughter . . . enough to drive one mad", roosters, radios, and the list goes on. One cannot help but imagine some of the characters energetically penning their complaints. Or the Bell Labs scientists jutting around NYC in their little "roving noise laboratory" truck filled with an "official measuring apparatus." I can't help but find this image amusing. As with many modernist attempts to stay ahead of the rapidly changing technological landscape, they go at it with gusto, armed with a bevy of precise scientific tools and methods all intended to somehow control the new technologies, yet still seemingly celebrating their newness at the same time. As one who sometimes becomes obsessive about whatever my own latest interest happens to be, I can relate and can't help but laugh a little at the recognition of my own occasional over-zealousness. As you explore the project on your own, I imagine you too may relate to some of the characters within, perhaps to someone penning a noise complaint about traffic, loud construction work, or a neighbor who just won't be quiet. Good narrative and design allow us to see our own experience reflected back in the experiences of others. This interactive project hopes to allow such an experience in a unique (and audible) way.]]>