The First Computers

When did the "silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swimin a sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud? Howloud is too loud, and says who? Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical andpolitical, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in the Western experience andunderstanding of noise. From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heardover baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback, from shouts frozen in Rabelaisianair to the squawk of loudspeakers and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows"unwanted sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic andindustrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. Atevery 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 diversesources as the archives of antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks anddental drills, letters and daybooks of physicists and physicians, military manuals and trainingfilms, travel diaries and civil defense pamphlets, as well as museum collections of bells, eartrumpets, megaphones, sirens, stethoscopes, and street organs, Schwartz traces the process by whichnoise today has become as powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel.

Endnotesand bibliography are not included in the physical book but are available online at the MIT Press Website.

Hillel Schwartz is the author of The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (Zone Books).