If I’m looking at myself in the mirror versus weighing myself on a scale, I feel very differently about what I’m seeing. Was the same thing true once people could start to measure the intensity of sound? Did people feel differently about what they were hearing once they could measure it?
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TRANSCRIPT: Yeah I think that once you can measure something, first of all there is a sense that you have control over it in some way. And it was easier to measure sound than it was to get rid of it. So I think the ability to measure may have deluded some people into how straightforward it would be to solve the problem of noise simply because they had these tools of measurement. I think it also highlighted public awareness of the problem. There were a lot of articles in the newspapers at the time announcing that the opera singer at the Met last night was as noisy as a streetcar and this is how many decibels of loudness that noise represents. They were kind of educating people in this new scientific language for thinking about noise. And that probably both heightened people’s perceptions of noise and also may have deluded them into thinking that scientists had control and would be able to fix the problem and not simply measure the problem.
