Michael Kimmelman's recent piece on the NY Times' interactive website, "Dear Architects, Sound Matters," suggests that we live in an unusually noisy age:. . . during the Middle Ages, smell was the unspoken plague of cities. Today it is sound. Streets, public spaces, bars, offices, even apartments and private houses can be painfully noisy, grim and enervating. . .
Thanks to the site, we hear that the sound of a book page turning can be distracting in the tomb-like Frick Art Reference Library and a baby's cries echo through St Patrick's Cathedral. But the site also allows you to compare sounds in different spaces; noise is relative.
And so, it's all the harder to believe that this is a particularly noisy age. Anyone familiar with New York's forgotten sounds would think twice . . . or should click over to Emily Thompson and Scott Mahoy's website, the Roaring Twenties. Richly detailed, the site uses historical records to help us recall the loudspeakers, boat whistles, and street hawkers who populated the city's raucous soundscape in the 1920s and 1930s. It reminds us that the twenties were "roaring" for a reason.
