courtesy Municipal Archives of the City of New York
Map of the City of New York (Board of Estimate and Apportionment,1933), detail
How does one engage with all this material? There are three different paths, three complementary ways to interact with the data. Since all sound exists in space and through time, the user can chose between journeys built around Sound, Space, or Time. The Sound interface organises the content by type of noise. Using categories from the era, one can call forth complaints and newsreel footage of specific kinds of noises, from newsboys and barking dogs to steam shovels and radio loudspeakers. The Space interface plots all the complaints and newsreels onto a map of the city. All five boroughs can be explored down to the street level via a beautiful map from 1933, enabling the user to visit specific neighbourhoods to discover the noises that characterised their past. Finally, a Timeline organises the material chronologically.
Of course, no historian – not even one possessing the most advanced technological tools – can ever truly reconstruct the past. The evidence is always incomplete, and the interests and biases of our own time shape our understanding of history as much as does the past itself. Our time machines thus ultimately and necessarily return us to ourselves. The sonic time machine that is The Roaring ‘Twenties is no exception. While dedicated to understanding the meaning of noise in the early twentieth century, it also speaks to more contemporary questions. Why, in the midst of our digitally- saturated, virtually-enacted, and earbud-insulated early twenty- first century world, do we find environmental sound and noise so compelling? Perhaps there is a nostalgia for the visceral at work within our disembodied lives. j
Fox Movietone News Collection, Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina link: The Fox Movietone Newsreel crew captured the sights and sounds of New York City in 1929, documenting the soundtrack of modern city life. Sound engineers measured noise in Times Square; construction sites resounded as machines dug and pounded the city’s surface; and along Cortland Street (known as Radio Row), the sound of traffic mixed with jazz and opera pouring forth from radio shop loudspeakers, an advertising practice that the city would ban in 1930.
The Roaring ‘Twenties is a collaboration between the author and web designer Scott Mahoy, produced under the auspices of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy of the University of Southern California. It will be accessible in late 2012 via Vectors at vectorsjournal.com or through the URL nycitynoise. com
21
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator