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Early twentieth-century Britons thought that they were living in the “age of noise,” sensing the historical changes going on around them as a series of disturbing shifts in the sonic atmosphere. From motorcar engines and wireless loudspeakers to the terrifying interruptions of mechanized warfare, the feeling of living in topsy-turvy times arrived via the ear. Yet historians have not listened to the sounds of early twentieth-century Britain nor unravelled what it meant to live in an “age of noise”. This book turns a critical ear to the “ways of hearing” operating in Britain between 1914 and 1945 and argues that attempts to shape encounters with everyday sound were expressive of hopes and fears for modernity. Competing expert groups – doctors, psychologists, planners, mystics, even – thought differently about how best to attune the individual hearing self to the sounding social body in modernity. Examining noise abatement campaigns, scientific as well as enchanted interventions in the everyday sonic environment, and attempts to manage the auditory culture of total war, the book offers the first auditory history of modern Britain.

Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth-century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard. This book tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting, sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, the book braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As the book shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.