The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (14 page)

FIVE

The Industrial Revolution

The Lo-Fi Soundscape of the Industrial Revolution
     The lo-fi soundscape was introduced by the Industrial Revolution and was extended by the Electric Revolution which followed it. The lo-fi soundscape originates with sound congestion. The Industrial Revolution introduced a multitude of new sounds with unhappy consequences for many of the natural and human sounds which they tended to obscure; and this development was extended into a second phase when the Electric Revolution added new effects of its own and introduced devices for packaging sounds and transmitting them schizophonically across time and space to live amplified or multiplied existences.

Today the world suffers from an overpopulation of sounds; there is so much acoustic information that little of it can emerge with clarity. In the ultimate lo-fi soundscape the signal-to-noise ratio is one-to-one and it is no longer possible to know what, if anything, is to be listened to. This, in summary, is the transformation of the soundscape which we will study in the next chapters.

The Industrial Revolution in England, the country which, for a variety of reasons, became the first to mechanize, took place approximately between 1760 and 1840. The principal technological changes which affected the soundscape included the use of new metals such as cast iron and steel as well as new energy sources such as coal and steam.

The textile industry was the first to undergo industrialization. John Kay’s flying shuttle (1733), James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1764–69) and Richard Arkwright’s waterframe (1769) led to the development of the power loom by 1785. Increased production of finished cotton goods led to a greater demand for raw cotton, a problem which was solved in the U.S.A. by Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1793). Other industries quickly followed, for as Alfred North Whitehead observed: “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.” A list of some of the more outstanding eighteenth-century inventions will allow the imaginative reader to overhear the changes in the soundscape which were worked by the new materials under the impress of new energy sources and the relentless precision of new machinery.

The social concomitants to these changes were also profound. Agricultural workers were disfranchised and sent to the cities to seek work in the factories. Operated by steam engines, lighted by gas, the new factories could work nonstop day and night, and pauperized workers were forced to do the same. The working day was increased to sixteen hours or more, with a single hour off for dinner. Workers lived in squalid quarters near the factories, cut off from the countryside, with almost no recreational facilities except the public houses; and these, if we accept the evidence of numerous earwitnesses, became centers of much greater noise and rowdi-ness during the eighteenth century than before.

I have already mentioned how factories put an end to the unity of work and song. At a later date, after the reform work of men like Robert Owen, the urge for singing reappeared in the British choral societies, which flourished best in the factory towns of the North. Workmen who experienced the crucifixion of human culture then sang
Messiah
at Christmas in thousand-voice choirs.

The cacophonies of iron pushed out over the countryside first in the form of the railroad and the threshing machine. We can measure the phases of change as the new farming machinery moved out from England across Europe. While Tolstoy’s Russian peasants still continued to sing over their sickles, the heroine of Hardy’s
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
(contemporary of Anna Karenina) stands mutely over her work smothered by the concatenated roar of the threshing machine.

A hasty lunch was eaten as they stood, without leaving their positions, and then another couple of hours brought them near to dinnertime; the inexorable wheels continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the thresher to thrill to the very marrow all who were near the revolving wirecage.

The Sounds of Technology

Sweep Across Town and Country
     While the philosophy of utilitarianism was sufficient to condone the inhumanities of Coketown, the machine was immediately conspicuous when it was introduced into provincial life. It took time for the sounds of technology to rub their way across Europe. The following set of earwitness accounts by writers over several generations reveals how the new sounds were gradually accepted as inevitable.

French towns were upset at first by the new rhythms and aberrational noises of the machine, as Stendhal makes clear on one of the first pages of
The Red and the Black
(1830).

The little town of Verrières must be one of the prettiest in the Franche-Comté. Its white houses with their steep, red tile roofs spread across a hillside, the folds of which are outlined by clumps of thrifty chestnut trees. The Doubs flows a couple of hundred feet below the town’s fortifications, built long ago by the Spaniards and now fallen into ruins. …

Scarcely inside the town, one is stunned by the racket of a roaring machine, frightful in its appearance. Twenty ponderous hammers, falling with a crash which makes the street shudder, are lifted for each new stroke by the power of a water wheel. Every one of these hammers makes, every day, I don’t know how many thousand nails. Young, pretty, fresh-faced girls, slip little slivers of iron into place beneath the sledge hammers, which promptly transform them into nails.

By 1864 French towns were alive with factories, and were described with disdain by the Goncourts.

A vague, indeterminate smell of grease and sugar, mixed with the emanations from the water and the smell of tar, rose from the candle factories, the glue factories, the tanneries, the sugar refineries, which were scattered about on the quay amongst thin, dried-up grass. The noise of foundries and the screams of steamwhistles broke, at every moment, the silence of the river.

By the early twentieth century the sounds of technology became more acceptable to the urban ear, “blending” with the natural rhythms of antiquity. As Thomas Mann described it:

We are encompassed with a roaring like that of the sea; for we live almost directly on the swift-flowing river that foams over shallow ledges at no great distance from the poplar avenue. … There is a locomotive foundry a little way downstream. Its premises have been lately enlarged to meet increased demands, and light streams all night long from its lofty windows. Beautiful glittering new engines roll to and fro on trial runs; a steam whistle emits wailing head-tones from time to time; muffled thunderings of unspecified origin shatter the air. … Thus in our half-suburban, half-rural seclusion the voice of nature mingles with that of man, and over all lies the bright-eyed freshness of the new day.

Ultimately the throb of the machine began to intoxicate man everywhere with its incessant vibrations. D. H. Lawrence (1915): “As they worked in the fields, from beyond the now familiar embankment came the rhythmic run of the winding engines, startling at first, but afterwards a narcotic to the brain.”

Eventually then the noises of modern industrial life swung the balance against those of nature, a fact which the futurist, Luigi Russolo, was the first to point out in his manifesto
The Art of Noises
(1913). Writing on the eve of the First World War, Russolo excitedly proclaimed that the new sensibility of man depended on his appetite for noises, which would achieve their grandest opportunity for expression in mechanized warfare.

Noise Equals Power
     We have gone far enough to show how the soundscape of both city and country was being transmogrified during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We are now confronted by an enigma: despite the vast increase in noise that the new machines created, rarely do we find opposition to these noises.

In England, the first criticism of working conditions in factories was that of Sadler’s Factory Investigating Committee of 1832. This pathetic seven-hundred-page document is filled with hideous descriptions of brutality and human degradation—shifts extending to thirty-five hours, children sleeping in the mills in order not to be late for work, workers collapsing into the machines from sheer fatigue, alcoholism among children—but nowhere is noise mentioned as a factor contributing to the tragedy of these environments. Only once or twice does one encounter there a reference to the “rumbling noise” of the machinery. When sound is noticed it is usually the screams of the workers when they are beaten.

I happened to be at the other end of the room, talking; and I heard
the blows, and I looked that way, and saw the spinner beating one of
the girls severely with a large stick. Hearing the sound led me to look
round, and to ask what was the matter, and they said it was “Nothing
but—paying [beating] his ligger-on.”

The only time the machines were ever stopped was to impress visitors, or during meal breaks, when the children had to clean them on their own time. Otherwise they rattled on undetected, and Sadler’s interviewees even spoke of the “silence” of the mills, by which they meant the “rule of silence.” “Is one part of the discipline of these mills profound silence?—Yes, they will not allow them to speak; if they chance to see two speaking, they are beaten with the strap.”

The only people to criticize the “prodigious noise” of machinery were the writers, figures like Dickens and Zola. Dickens, in
Hard Times
(1854):

Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady. A special contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he laboured.

Zola, in
Germinal
(1885):

And now it had occurred to him to open the steam-cocks and let out the steam. The jets went off like gunshots and the five boilers blew off like hurricanes, with such a thunderous hissing that your ears seemed to be bleeding.

Despite these attacks, it was still to be a hundred years before noise criteria would be established and enforced as part of hygiene programs in industry. Neither unions nor social reformers nor the medical profession caught the theme. Noise was certainly known to cause deafness as early as 1831 when Fosbroke described deafness occurring among blacksmiths, but this remained an isolated study until 1890 when Barr surveyed one hundred boilermakers and discovered that not one of them had normal hearing.
^g
Hammering and riveting steel plates together produced an intense noise, resulting in a form of hearing impairment in which there is deafness to high frequencies. The term “boilermaker’s disease” came into use shortly afterward to refer to all kinds of industrial hearing loss, though its prevention only received serious consideration in most industrialized countries toward 1970.

The inability to recognize noise during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution as a factor contributing to the multiplicatory toxicity of the new working environments is one of the strangest facts in the history of aural perception. We must try to determine the reason. It may be partly explained as a result of the inability to measure sounds quantitatively. A sound might be recognized as unpleasantly loud, but until Lord Rayleigh built the first practical precision instrument for the measurement of acoustic intensity in 1882, there was no way of knowing for certain whether a subjective impression had an objective basis. The decibel, as a means of establishing definite sound pressure levels, did not come into extended use until 1928.