Many of the sounds from your site, such as the church bells and locomotive trains, make me feel nostalgic for simpler times. And yet these are the sounds that people were complaining about. How can your work help us understand how people in the 1920s would have heard these sounds?
TRANSCRIPT: The idea is that you would actually spend time with the site reading the letters where people were complaining about these kinds of sounds, reading some of the little summaries of newspaper and magazine articles talking about the problem of noise and just kind of spend time with a lot of textual documents that can do some of the work of trying to get your mindset into the past so that you can understand how people were perceiving these sounds at the time that they were recorded. And that way perhaps you can push back a bit against that attractive nostalgic kind of approach and really try to understand the past on its own terms and recover the noisiness of those sounds….
So it’s a challenge, it’s a challenge, but I think history is always a challenge and the best history will kind of operate on two levels: it will do its best to take you back to understand the past on its own terms but also in a way that it has meaning for you today. So I think if you can operate on both levels at once or perhaps at a midpoint between the two then that’s not a bad thing.
