Discord: The Story of Noise by Mike Goldsmith (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Discord: The Story of Noise by Mike Goldsmith
Discord is that sort of genial, Whiggish, Anglocentric account that science lecturers once dashed off for Victorian weeklies. And dashed off this book was. Author of thirty-plus books of popular science since 1999, Goldsmith, a physicist, commits error after error as he skips through the millennia, shunting the writing of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh to India, playwright Ben Jonson (1572-1637) to the eighteenth century, and novelist Robert Musil from Austria to Germany.
Goldsmith's thesis is that the number, loudness, and kinds of noises have increased over the ages due to the growth of population, cities, and industry. Annoyance with noise increased proportionately, as the sole effective recourse was zoning that restricted noise-producers by time or place. Only since 1895 and the Harvard investigations of Wallace (not William) Clement Sabine has science furnished mathematical principles for viable acoustic design and noise attenuation. Amplified during the 1920s by better microphones and audiometric scaling, "after thousands of years of slow progress, the science of sound leapt forward" (p. 164). That progress, with that leap, appears to have been primarily British—even the baptism, if not the conception, of the decibel—although Goldsmith does pause to assess the works of Galileo, Athanasius Kircher, Pierre Laplace, Daniel Colladon, Ernst Weber, Hermann Helmholtz, and Harvey Fletcher (not Harold or, as indexed, Harry).
On acoustics, Goldsmith is cogent though never explains standing waves (p. 9) or "otiosclerosis" [sic] (p. 85) and smirks throughout at the theoretical slips or miscalculations of past geniuses. A better technical introduction to noise, whether electrical, biological, statistical, or musical, is Noise (2006) by engineer and composer Bart Kosko. On the sociocultural, political, and legal contexts of noise and noise-suppression, Discord cannot be trusted because Goldsmith's data and reasoning are sketchy or unsourced and often misleading. His work is generally detached from the field of sound studies, to which major contributions have been made by anthropologists and urban ethnographers, literary and environmental historians, eco-philosophers, sound artists, music theorists, and partisans of the deaf community.
Where Goldsmith does cite sound historians like Karin Bijsterveld, Emily Ann Thompson, and those others whose excerpted work appears in Mark Smith's anthology Hearing History (2004), he rarely comes to grips with the issues they raise or with the extensive writings of Smith himself. He ignores relevant thinking by Jacques Attali, Michael Bull, Steven Feld, Douglas Kahn, Inge Marszolek, Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Sloterdijk, Jonathan [End Page 656] Sterne, Peter Szendy, and Sabine von Fischer. Surprisingly, he also neglects standard histories of acoustical science by fellow physicists Robert Beyer and Frederick Hunt, as well as the psychoacoustic explorations of Stephen Handel and the well-instrumented analyses of acoustic environments by Barry Truax—a guiding force in the (unmentioned) World Federation of Acoustic Ecology.
Those gathering squibs for anti-noise briefs will find Discord inferior to R. Murray Schafer's classic The Tuning of the World (1977), which Goldsmith cites recurrently though errantly and without reference to Schafer's central idea of hi-fi and low-fi environments. During his decades with (and sometime directorship of) the acoustics section of the UK National Physical Laboratory, Goldsmith listened intently for problems of speech and reverberation while helping the European Union refine standards of noise measurement, but he has paid little heed to historians of technology or to the concerns of technocultural studies.
Hillel Schwartz is an independent historian and visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (2011).
