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Drawing upon such diverse sources as the archives of antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks and dental drills, and daybooks of physicists, travel diaries and civil defense pamphlets, Schwartz traces the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel. When did the "silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a sea of cosmic noise ? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud ? How loud is too loud, and says who ? Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise. From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback, from shouts frozen in Rabelaisian air to the squawk of loudspeakers and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows "unwanted sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic and industrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage, readers can hear the cultural reverberations of the historical soundwork of actresses, admen, anthropologists, astronomers, builders, composers, dentists, economists, engineers, filmmakers, firemen, grammar school teachers, jailers, nurses, oceanographers, pastors, philosophers, poets, psychologists, and the writers of children's books.

Noise pollution --- Noise --- Noise in literature. --- Sounds --- Sound --- History. --- Psychological aspects. --- Psychological aspects.. --- Social aspects. --- Noise in literature --- Pollution --- Acoustics --- Continuum mechanics --- Mathematical physics --- Physics --- Pneumatics --- Radiation --- Wave-motion, Theory of --- Sound effects --- Manners and customs --- History --- Psychological aspects --- Social aspects --- Psychology --- Son --- Bruit --- Psychologie --- Histoire de la musique --- Histoire de l'art