"I have no idea how he wrote this book, or how anyone could ever have written a book like this. Absolutely titanic in its scope (over 20 years in the making) The book's construction mimics solar systems dancing their spiraled paths inward towards an immense gravity of a black hole at the galaxy's eye. Maybe that's how he did it . . . Maybe a topic as dense and broad as 'Noise' generates enough gravity to keep everything structurally intact while giving Mr. Schwartz the freedom to bounce effortlessly from theme to theme.
In the span of three pages he leaps from the deafening birth groans of the goddess Tiamat to the 100 decible loud shimmering transmission of a cicada's cry, without the text ever feeling convoluted or forced. While this may have been enough for most, the real magic of Making Noise can be found in its masterfully written prose. Hillel Schwartz is a poet and translator by trade and his command of words and their relation to one another, and their expressiveness, makes for a remarkable journey into the vast world of sound. The author's phonetics alone are worth the price of the book and, with this in mind, the author makes it explicitly clear the book should only be read aloud (Think dinner parties!) Perfect for the educated musician who wishes to deepen their sound into everything else."
Publisher Zone
Publication Date 2011-11-04
Section Academic New Arrivals / Cultural & Critical Theory / All Staff Suggestions / Andy N.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781935408123
When did the "silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud? How loud is too loud, and says who? Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise. From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback, from shouts frozen in Rabelaisian air to the squawk of loudspeakers and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows "unwanted sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic and industrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific.
At every stage, readers can hear the cultural reverberations of the historical soundwork of actresses, ad-men, 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 diverse sources as the archives of antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks and dental drills, letters and daybooks of physicists and physicians, military manuals and training films, travel diaries and civil defense pamphlets, as well as museum collections of bells, ear trumpets, megaphones, sirens, stethoscopes, and street organs, Schwartz traces the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel.
