705648

review-article2017
JUHXXX10.1177/0096144217705648Journal of Urban HistoryReview Essay

Review Essay
Journal of Urban History
2018, Vol. 44(2) 341­–348
New Histories of the Urban © The Author(s) 2017
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Karin Bijsterveld, ed. (2013). Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage.
Bielefeld: transcript. 229 pp., $40 (paper).

Carolyn Birdsall (2012). Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933-1945.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 272 pp., notes, selected bibliography, index, $49.95 (paper).

Aimée Boutin (2015). City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
194 pp., notes, selected bibliography, index, $25 (paper).

Reviewed by: James G. Mansell, University of Nottingham, UK

DOI: 10.1177/0096144217705648

Keywords
soundscapes, noise, auditory culture, listening, sonic heritage

Scholarly investigations of the urban environment have become increasingly attentive to lived
experience. Recent books such as Nicholas Kenny’s The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban
Transformation (2014) and Adam Mack’s Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and
Muckrakers (2015) represent a shift in urban studies and in the humanities as a whole toward
investigation of the felt, the sensed, and the embodied.1 Cities are more than the sum total of their
spatial and social structures: they resonate, smell, rumble, and shimmer; they delight and disgust,
pulling us together and pushing us apart in ways that don’t always straightforwardly register in
the historical record. The haptic, olfactory, and gustatory dimensions of the urban are getting due
attention at last. It is, however, the sonic that has really captured the scholarly imagination in
recent years. Through sound, scholars from across a range of disciplines have quite fundamen-
tally rethought urban space, urban subjectivities, and almost everything in between. From
Michael Bull’s investigations of how headphone listeners use music to manage urban experience
in Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (2000) to
Karin Bijsterveld et al.’s history of how we listen in our cars, Sound and Safe: A History of
Listening Behind the Wheel (2014), our understanding of what it is exactly that constitutes “the
urban” has been thoroughly transformed.2 For modern urban historians, Emily Thompson’s The
Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America,
1900-33 (2004) is perhaps the most important text in the new field of sound studies, showing us
not only that the modern city as it emerged in the early twentieth century was constituted as much
by its “soundscapes” as it was by its streetscapes, but also that urban planners and urban-dwellers
paid deliberate and careful attention to how their city sounded as a means of navigating cultural
change, making social distinctions, and imposing disciplinary order.3 It is testament to the influ-
ence of scholarship such as Thompson’s that the term soundscape (according to her “an auditory
or aural landscape” functioning simultaneously as “a physical environment and a way of perceiv-
ing that environment”) now barely requires definition, where once it would have struck even the
most forward-looking of historians as barely comprehensible cultural studies jargon.4
The three books under review here make significant new contributions to our understanding
of historical urban soundscapes. They take the tools forged by earlier sound studies pioneers and
342 Journal of Urban History 44(2)

put them to work in rewriting some familiar topics in urban history. The common point of depar-
ture is that each book, in its own way, aims to challenge the primacy given to the visual in inter-
pretations of urban modernity. They insist, instead, on the importance—if not centrality—of
sound, hearing and listening to the experience and representation of the modern city. Focusing on
Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the three books aim to give us new, auditory,
perspectives on the urban past. In Aimée Boutin’s City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century
Paris, the city of Baudelaire, so often the focal point of theories about urban modernity, is trans-
formed from a realm of scopophilic flânerie and spectacularized urban capital into an echo-
chamber of street cries and wandering listeners. Carolyn Birdsall’s Nazi Soundscapes: Sound,
Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933-1945 listens with “earwitnesses” to National
Socialism and points to the mobilization of technologized sound in the control of urban space.
Karin Bijsterveld’s essay collection Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated
Cultural Heritage takes a forensic ear to urban representation and memory, analyzing how writ-
ers, filmmakers, radio producers, museum curators, and others have captured the dynamism of
our sonic heritage. Boutin puts it bluntly in the introduction to her book: she proposes “an aural
rather than a visual conception of modernity” (p. 3). In making this case, Boutin joins a sound
studies trend that aims to replace the “hegemony of vision” thesis with an argument in favor of
sound’s importance, if not perceptual primacy, in the development of cultural and social
modernity.5 Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003),
for example, traced the influence of new sound technologies and new expert techniques of listen-
ing in the nineteenth century on the formation and functioning of modern forms of bureaucracy,
medicine, communication, and commerce.6 For Birdsall, the tendency to understand urban
modernity only “in terms of the predominance of visual culture, described by Guy Debord as the
‘immense accumulation of spectacles’” is misleading, since “the pace of modernity, and its
effects on selfhood in the decades around 1900, was also intertwined with the auditory realm, if
not a technologically-informed ‘auditory self’” (p. 16).7 Scholars such as Birdsall do not seek to
replace the visual in the analysis of urban culture but rather encourage us to think of visuality as
intertwined with other sensory constructions, particularly the sonic. Birdsall notes that she
“avoid[s] simple oppositions between the auditory and the visual, given that all media are mixed
media, and draw on mixed sensory modes” (p. 26). For Bijsterveld, novels, films, and radio plays
offer us rich sources of information about the history of urban sounds and shape the way we
remember urban soundscapes. Yet while we have ever more sophisticated ways to analyze visual
representation of cities, we have not invested anywhere near as much scholarly energy into think-
ing about how city sounds are represented through the “repertoires of dramatizing sound” and
“auditory topoi” (p. 15) that she and her contributing authors show to be central to our cultural
relationships with the urban environment.
The three books share another essential starting point with most other contributions to the new
field of sound studies. All three insist that sound historians should pay primary attention to the
role of the mediating ear and of the auditory imagination rather than to the so-called “sounds
themselves.” Bijsterveld explains in her introduction to Soundscapes of the Urban Past that
rather than focus on “all the sounds citizens could hear at particular moments in time,” it is more
properly the job of the sound historian to “examine how citizens’ past habitus conditioned their
ways of listening” (p. 16). By this, she means that we should be attentive to questions such as

Which sounds did they listen to most attentively, and why? Which sounds seemed simply below their
threshold of perception? And what were, in terms of auditory and other sensory impressions, the
configurations of the tolerable and intolerable in past societies? (p. 16)

Boutin adds that trying to listen directly to the sounds of the past, whether through audio
recordings or through written accounts, is futile. “Though our ears work the same way as they did
Review Essay 343

in the nineteenth century, we do not hear things the same way: our sensitivity to city noise has
changed” (p. 3). Although she prioritizes the concept of the “earwitness,” Birdsall, too, is careful
to warn against the “fantasy of unmediated access to past sounds” (p. 12) and deals instead with
the variety of ways in which Nazi propagandists encouraged certain “ways of listening” to radio
broadcasts and other auditory information, using the term “historicity of modern listening” to
describe the context-dependent act of encountering sound (p. 26). While those familiar with the
history of the senses will be used to such arguments, it remains necessary to restate the case for
the social shaping of perception to those working in the heritage industry, according to the con-
tributors to Soundscapes of the Urban Past. One of the aims of this book is indeed to help
museum curators and others interested in using sound in public history to do so with the “contex-
tualization” necessary to avoid “historical inaccuracy” (pp. 33-34).
Allow me to give a brief overview of the three books’ content before I move on to some fur-
ther points of connection and contention. Boutin’s City of Noise joins a now very extensive his-
torical literature on urban noise. Texts such as Bijsterveld’s Mechanical Sounds: Technology,
Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (2008) identify noise, in the sense
of unwanted sound, as a prominent feature of modern urban life.8 Providing an urban counterpart
to Alain Corbin’s now classic study, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century
French Countryside (1998), Boutin’s City of Noise sets out to convince us that along with politi-
cal upheavals and major urban transformation, Paris’s nineteenth-century was an era of “increas-
ing awareness of, and emphasis on, noise” (p. 3).9 In contrast to the twentieth-century obsession
with technological noise highlighted in Bijsterveld’s Mechanical Sounds, Boutin argues that the
preeminent sound discussed in the nineteenth century in relation to the soundscape of Paris was
in fact the street peddler’s cry. She draws on a range of literary source material—guidebooks,
poetry, and music criticism—as well as visual sketches, to trace the imaginative investments
made in the sound of street cries over the course of the century. Boutin points out that “as a visual
and textual phenomenon, the Cris de Paris proliferated in nineteenth-century France” even
though “the numbers of actual peddlers and the volume of their cries declined” (p. 129). On one
hand, this trend represents, for Boutin, the nostalgia at the heart of nineteenth-century Parisian
modernity. “The charm of street cries . . . came from their vestigial status as remnants of a fading
sound culture, equated with the acoustic intimacy and picturesque character of old Paris”
(p. 130). On the other hand, the noisiness of street cries acted as the foil (even if they were not
actually present) to the growing bourgeois demand for quiet in the modern city. The cries of ped-
dlers were, Boutin suggests, “perceived as nuisances by bourgeois listeners increasingly sensitive
to sound, especially noxious sound” (p. 5). Boutin argues that precisely because of this bourgeois
hostility, avant-garde poets like Baudelaire were inspired by the outcast sounds of the peddler
and sought to incorporate their “emotional force and artistic potential” (p. 82) into poetic lan-
guage “as an antidote to bourgeois complacency” (p. 106). Boutin concludes that the cultural
memorialization of the Cris de Paris tells us a good deal about sonic reactions to the moderniza-
tion of Paris over the course of the century, including the process of Haussmannization. Boutin
argues that

the active circulation of the Cris de Paris as cultural memory shows the degree to which the tradition
remained relevant in the nineteenth century, not just because it revived the past, but also because it
structured the present. They were repeatedly evoked as a sonorous blazon essential to the city’s
character and sense of place,

but, at the same time, “embodied the opposition between noisemakers and silence seekers”
and in turn the “distinction between bourgeois and working-class identities” (p. 131). Perhaps the
most significant of Boutin’s chapters from the urban historian’s perspective is Chapter 1, “Aural
Flânerie: The Flâneur in the City as Concert” which acts as a useful corrective to the extensive,
344 Journal of Urban History 44(2)

visually orientated, historical literature on Paris as a spectacularized and looked-at city. Boutin
states, “An understanding of the flâneur conceived as bathed in a multitude of sounds and sights
rather than an untouchable mobile gaze enriches our definitions of modernity” (pp. 12-13).
Birdsall’s Nazi Soundscapes takes us to another familiar topic in modern European history and
provides a no less original take on it by listening rather than looking. Where Boutin offers close
reading of literary sources, Birdsall begins with oral history interviews as an access point to recov-
ering “earwitness” testimony about life under National Socialism. One interviewee said to Birdsall:
“The memories are coming back to me as I talk about them now and they’ve been buried inside
me for a long time. The sounds are now ringing in my ears” (p. 173). The sounds that Birdsall
recovers are mainly those produced by new sound technologies of the period: radio, gramophone,
citywide siren systems, sound cinema, and loudspeakers. She identifies these as essential to the
Nazi attempt to assert control over everyday life, particularly in urban space. Rather than focus
directly on the content relayed by new sound technologies, Birdsall reminds us that “sound is a
temporal-spatial phenomenon that—in all cases—relies on air pressure and reflective surfaces to
make itself heard” (p. 15). Each of her four chapters draws case study material from the city of
Düsseldorf—its homes, streets, and public gathering places—as a sounding space. She does this
to counter the dominance of Berlin as a city “that can be ‘seen’ and ‘read’” in “much of the schol-
arship about modern, urban culture” (p. 13). Birdsall argues that Nazi sounds in the urban environ-
ment were intended to produce “affirmative resonance” through, for example, “collective signing
and cheering” or “in the call and response interactions between a speaker and a crowd” (p. 28).
Chapter 3, “Mobilising Sound for the Nation at War,” offers a highly original analysis of how
radio broadcasts and sirens were used to condition a sense of national belonging and exclusion
during the Second World War. Birdsall is equally sensitive to the spatial and to the temporal
dimensions of wartime listening, offering a fascinating extended analysis, for example, of the
“Sondermeldungen” or “surprise interruptions to the normal broadcasting schedule” which gave
listeners a sense of live participation in the national struggle by providing updates on the war situ-
ation. She argues that propagandists deliberately situated radio listeners as “earwitnesses” (p. 104)
through techniques such as these. In the pretelevision age, Birdsall shows that close and attentive
listening was the force that made and unmade community ties and that in seeking to impose power
on a wartime population, Nazi propagandists understood only too well the power of sound to per-
suade. Birdsall writes, “Germans were consistently positioned as earwitnesses participating in and
belonging to a Volksgemeinschaft (national community)” (p. 174). The wider insight generated by
her book that “sounds—contrary to popular assumption—are not necessarily immediate and inti-
mate” and that we are instead “conditioned and encouraged to perceive auditory experience in
social and collective terms” is a useful summation of the aim of historical sound studies and is
certainly applicable beyond the context of Nazi Germany.
As an edited collection of essays, Bijsterveld’s Soundscapes of the Urban Past is somewhat
harder to pin down to one central contribution, but the book revolves, essentially, around one
major explanatory chapter, “Shifting Sounds: Textualization and Dramatization of Urban
Soundscapes” by Bijsterveld, Annelies Jacobs, Jasper Aalbers, and Andreas Fickers. Taking a
comparative media approach to the presence of urban sound in literature, life writing, film, and
radio drama, the authors provide fascinating insight into representational trends and patterns
across a wide range of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century artistic material. According to
Bijsterveld and her collaborators, “across different media the same narrative tools were employed
for capturing and staging sound.” These were “the urban arrival scene” (that is, establishing
scenes that leave the reader/viewer/listener in no doubt as to where the action is taking place),
“showing the daily rhythm of life,” “juxtaposing the soundscapes of different neighborhoods
within one city,” and “contrasting the soundscapes of the present, past and future” (p. 59). The
establishing of such “auditory topoi” is more likely to appeal to those of a sociological inclination
than to those in humanities disciplines better used to a less, shall we say, structuralist approach,
Review Essay 345

but the chapter’s findings are nevertheless deeply interesting and suggestive of future lines of
research. The conclusion that such representational topoi constitute “the ways in which” artistic
texts “made us listen” is convincing and important, and is used to urge museum curators to be
attentive to the imaginational contexts of past ways of hearing. In the book’s third chapter, the
same authors take their method and apply it to the case study of Berlin Alexanderplatz, the 1929
novel by Alfred Döblin which was subsequently much adapted into other media. The shorter
chapters which accompany the material written by the core author team are less successful,
mainly because these chapters—one by Mark M. Smith on the sounds of urban water, one by
Patricia Pisters on “The Chirping of a Little Bird” and one by Evi Karathanasopoulou and Andrew
Crisell on “Radio Documentary and the Formation of Urban Aesthetics”—are too brief, frustrat-
ingly so, to offer a satisfying contribution. Holger Schulze’s chapter on “Experiencing
Soundscapes on Audio Guides” and Ross Brown’s on “The Theatre of Memorial Silence” are
somewhat more substantial, but still given too little space to do justice to their subjects. Longer
additional contributions by Birdsall on “Reality Codes of Urbanity in Early German Radio
Documentary” and by Jonathan Sterne on “Soundscape, Landscape, Escape” (about which more,
below) are, on the other hand, excellent.
That these three books should maintain and extend a tradition of writing about urban “sound-
scapes” is notable in its own right. All three owe a debt, and in the case of the Birdsall and
Bijsterveld books an explicit one, to R. Murray Schafer’s original 1970s definition of “sound-
scape.” Schafer’s book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World,
first published in 1977 as The Tuning of the World, has been highly influential in sound studies,
but is increasingly controversial.10 Schafer defined soundscape studies as the spatial analysis of
sounding phenomena, but proposed the field primarily as a way of counteracting the unhealthy
urban and technological noise pollution that he thought was wreaking havoc on the health-induc-
ing natural soundscape. As Sterne puts it in Bijsterveld’s book, “For Schafer . . . soundscape is
meant to invoke nature, and the limits and outsides of industrial society” (p. 183). Thompson was
careful to circumnavigate the antimodern and antiurban politics at the heart of Schafer’s defini-
tion of the soundscape in The Soundscape of Modernity. Others have openly dismissed the value
of thinking in terms of separate sensory “scapes” at all. In his essay “Against Soundscape,” the
social anthropologist Tim Ingold urged scholars to do without the concept altogether, because

the environment that we experience, know and move around in is not sliced up along the lines of the
sensory pathways by which we enter into it. The world we perceive is the same world, whatever path
we take, and each of us perceives it as an undivided centre of activity and awareness.11

Ingold argues that the soundscape concept transforms sound into a series of discrete sounding
objects rather than what we should more properly understand it as, a medium through which we
perceive, indissoluble from other sensations and from the working of our bodies. He thinks that
visual culture scholars have made the same mistake in focusing their attention on images rather
than light.

Since it is modelled on the concept of landscape, soundscape places the emphasis on the surfaces of
the world in which we live. Sound and light, however, are infusions of the medium in which we find
our being and through which we move.12

Ingold’s call for multisensory analysis might undermine the very viability of sound studies
as a field, and it is perhaps for this reason that his contribution to the debate about soundscapes
is rarely mentioned by sound scholars. The controversy surrounding the concept makes it inter-
esting that Bijsterveld and Birdsall both use it so prominently in the titles of their books, signal-
ing their ongoing commitment to it as a conceptual tool. Birdsall rejects the “pessimistic
346 Journal of Urban History 44(2)

narrative about historical change” (p. 22) in Schafer as well as the uncomplicated claim that
radio technology straightforwardly facilitated the rise of Nazism in the work of Schafer’s col-
laborator Barry Truax (p. 23). Nevertheless, for Birdsall, “The work of these scholars remains
important, particularly since they remind us that listening patterns are culturally and socially
formed, and that they are interlinked with historically specific physical spaces and urban con-
texts” (p. 20). Bijsterveld takes it as self-evident that urban areas have “keynote sounds”
(“sounds that make up the background sound of a sonic environment”), “sound marks” (“sounds
that stand out in a particular environment”), and “sound icons” (sounds that have become
“iconic for particular locations”) (p. 15). This terminology is taken directly from Schafer’s
analysis of the urban soundscape. Birdsall and Bijsterveld’s use of Schafer’s soundscape con-
cept certainly serves a purpose in their research design. Nonetheless, it is interesting that most
sound studies scholars, particularly those dealing with historical topics, have so far been resis-
tant to the approaches developed in the study of affect and affective atmospheres which might
offer new ways to think about sounding, hearing, and listening, or at the very least prompt a
fuller defense of the soundscape approach vis-à-vis these new theoretical approaches.
Wherever you stand on the soundscape debate, there is no question that Sterne’s chapter in
Soundscapes of the Urban Past provides an invaluable intervention. Sterne does not recommend
jettisoning the term, but does insist that we remain as reflexive as possible in recognizing that schol-
arly terminology such as “soundscape” tells us something about our own “ways of perceiving and
living space” (p. 183). Sterne argues that “as a concept, soundscape is artefactual, which is to say it
comes out of a particular cultural moment and location” (p. 183). Sterne locates Schafer’s discus-
sion of the soundscape in relation to his use of the terms “hi-fi” and “lo-fi” which “had come into
vogue” as ways of marketing music “as Schafer’s ideas first came together” (p. 188).

Magazines and advertisements presented hi-fi as cultivated, sophisticated and edifying. A hi-fi
system was said to promise access to the extremes of experience and an escape from the world of
middlebrow taste and the levelling effects of mass culture. It offered opportunities for immersion and
transcendence through contemplative listening. (p. 188)

Sterne argues that Schafer borrowed from this cultural imaginary:

Although Schafer’s politics are clearly both anti-modernist and anti-consumerist, he makes use of the
same language of escape. The very definition of the hi-fi soundscape borrows its morphology from
the aesthetics of the hi-fi record and hi-fi system in the bourgeois living room. (p. 188)

This entertaining account of the origins of Schafer’s soundscape concept is accompanied by the
intriguing claim that the first use of the term was not in fact by Schafer, but rather by Buckminster
Fuller in the late 1960s. Sterne claims that Fuller’s use of the term was intended “to denote the
entire sonic field of humankind as it exists in a dynamic relationship with nature” (p. 186), perhaps
rather closer to what Ingold would have sound studies do.
Distinctions between different kinds and qualities of sound are an essential element of the
cultural politics of the sonic as outlined in scholarship such as Sterne’s, as well as in the three
books under review here. One interesting recurring theme through all three books is the ten-
dency to imaginatively organize and index urban sounds in relation to models and ideals pro-
vided by music. One of the benefits of the structure-building approach taken by Bijsterveld
et al.’s chapter on “Shifting Sounds” is that it can come to this kind of conclusion: “while the
musicalization of sonic vocabularies was typical of works from the late nineteenth century, the
noisification of music was characteristic for, though not fully confined to, works from the early
twentieth century” (p. 59). The “musicalization” identified by Bijsterveld et al. is certainly in
evidence in Boutin’s chapters. In her chapter on the flâneur, Boutin notes that travel writers
often heard street noises with the ear of a music connoisseur. “When writers talk of the
Review Essay 347

city-as-concert,” Boutin notes, “it is the street noise they hear, but they conceive it in relation to
the auditory salon culture that they increasingly find more appealing” (p. 24). Situating “musi-
calization” in these terms renders it part of the class-based formation of auditory habitus in the
modern city. In perhaps her most powerful argument, Boutin states that avant-garde poets sought
to resist this auditory appropriation. Baudelaire resisted the “urge to transpose the city into an
aesthetic sound, he shocked the reader with its stridency and forced us to think about the latent
violence in urban sonic relations” (p. 135). Birdsall traces the extension of the musicalizing
process into the early twentieth-century cinematic genre of the “city symphony” film, such as
Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1929). The rhythmic order which these
films imposed on the city appealed to the Nazi desire to infiltrate everyday life, according to
Birdsall. As for the “noisification” of music, this trend is observable in the work of composers
such as Luigi Russolo and George Antheil, but also in a range of texts described by Bijsterveld
et al. Such points of overlap between the three books indicate the ways in which scholars might
draw upon them in future sound studies endeavors.
Read as a triplet they also lead me to question, however, whether sound historians (and I
include myself in this category, and extend the question to my own work) do enough to demon-
strate why and how paying attention to sound can help us to think differently about power rela-
tions in the modern city. Power is a key concern in these books, particularly in the Boutin and
Birdsall texts. Boutin deals primarily with class relations in the modern city, and although she
unquestionably brings new and interesting source material to light and provides a highly original
new way to read nineteenth-century French literature, it is less clear how her contribution to our
understanding of auditory class relations breaks new ground, reinforcing as it does rather than
questioning what we already know about the languages of class, and offering relatively little in
analytical terms beyond the approaches already established by sound studies authors like James
Johnson (Listening to Paris) and John M. Picker (Victorian Soundscapes). I had hoped for more
explicit reflection, for example, on the cultural politics of the voice (certainly an area ripe for
further work), but Boutin elides the peddlers’ cry with the generic category of urban noise, taking
it as one and the same as other nuisance street sounds. Boutin’s source material holds her back,
perhaps. Limited mainly to literary sources, Boutin often takes the “bourgeoisie” to be the same
thing as the avant-garde notion of “bourgeois,” and thus strips it of the nuances and contradic-
tions of social reality. Gender goes unmentioned, too, though it surely played some role in the
hearing of street cries and in the power of flâneur-listeners.
Birdsall’s book also prompts some unanswered questions in its theorization of power rela-
tions. As in Boutin’s case, the burden of recovering the sonic in the historical source material is
work enough, but distracts, perhaps, from a fuller reflection on how the sonic might help us to
rethink power in urban history. Birdsall turns to Foucault to help her explain the social power of
urban air-raid sirens in her chapter on the Second World War, but in drawing extensively upon
Discipline and Punish’s discussion of spatial strategies during medieval plague outbreaks, she
rather gives the impression that Nazi power was separate from, even retrogressive in relation to,
the modern strategies of governmental power of which Foucault is such a perceptive analyst.
This is rather unfortunate, not only because analyses of power in relation to Nazi Germany now
seem to be seeking out the continuities between fascist and liberal governmentalities, but also
because it suggests that Birdsall’s insights about sound media and technology might be limited to
the narrow case of Nazi Germany, which they most certainly are not. Like Boutin’s City of Noise,
Birdsall’s Nazi Soundscapes has much to offer the sound as well as the urban historian, but more
remains to be done to unravel how, precisely, attending to sound can allow us to think in new
ways about issues beyond the sonic, particularly the machinations of power and inequality. The
literature on affect and affective atmospheres might provide some of the way forward in this
respect, though it would need some adaptation to fit the needs of the historian. The three books
reviewed here provide ample evidence that paying attention to sound, as well as to other kinds of
348 Journal of Urban History 44(2)

sensations, can open up new avenues for historical research. That more work remains to be done,
and that this work is, to my mind at least, so self-evidently worth doing, only testifies to the value
of scholarship such as Bijsterveld, Boutin and Birdsall’s.

Notes
  1. Nicholas Kenny, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2014); Adam Mack, Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
  2. Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Oxford:
Berg, 2000); Karin Bijsterveld, Eefje Cleophas, Stefan Krebs and Gijs Mom, Sound and Safe: A History
of Listening Behind the Wheel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
  3. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening
in America, 1900-33 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
 4. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 1.
 5. On hegemony of vision, see David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
  6. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003).
  7. Birdsall is building here on a concept first advanced in Steven Connor, “The Modern Auditory I,” in
Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge,
1997), 203-23.
 8. Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sounds: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
  9. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans.
Peter Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
10. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester:
Destiny Books, 1994).
11. Tim Ingold, “Against Soundscape,” in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice,
ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), 10.
12. Tim Ingold, “Against Soundscape,” in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice,
ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), 11.

Author Biography
James G. Mansell is an assistant professor of cultural studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the
author of The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017) and
coeditor of The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011).