You talked about how city officials tried to tackle sound complaints in the past, by inventing new technologies to hide and cover up sounds. They also passed new laws to regulate the use of sound. Did they invent any new standards of politeness or cultural mores to deal with these noise complaints?
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/125602253″ params=”color=ff6600″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Really in many ways the noise abatement campaigns that New York City held in 1929 and 1930 was really trying to operate on that level. They realized they had limited ability to legislate laws and then even less ability necessarily to enforce any that might get on the books. And a great deal of the energy of that campaign was to educate people, educate people about what they felt were the serious problems associated with noise–medical problems, work productivity problems, things like that–but then also simply to undertake a kind of campaign for specific courtesy.
And the radio stations for awhile were encouraged by the noise abatement commission and they followed through by making an announcement later in the evening encouraging their listeners to turn the volume down and respect their neighbors sonic privacy.
But there was a sense, kind of an idealistic sense that if you just told people how problematic noise was, they would changes their ways and everyone would get along much better. In fact it didn’t really work out that way and even the laws that were passed were hard to enforce. So in general the noise abatement campaign was not terribly successful, it was not perceived as being terribly successful at the time.
