Sounds of the city: the soundscape of early modern European towns

In European towns of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sounds people heard were very different from those of today. Yet the difference goes much deeper: whereas today we try to escape city noise, for the inhabitants of earlymodern towns sound served as a crucial source of information. It formed a semiotic system, conveying news, helping people to locate themselves in time and in space, and making them part of an ‘auditory community’. Sound helped to construct identity and to structure relationships. The evolution of this information system reflects changes in social and political organization and in attitudes towards time and urban space. Cities have always been noisy places. Yet, on the whole, urban historians have paid little attention to urban sound, tending to assume that even if the sounds themselves were different, the role they played was similar. Thus horses’ hooves and rumbling carriageswere the equivalent of today’s traffic noise; the bells of early modern cities were the alarm clocks, factory horns and recorded school ‘bells’ of today. In a certain sense this is true, yet just as people in the past interpreted the visual world differently, so too they experienced sound differently from the way we do. How can we understand the terror of thunder for peoplewhodidnot knowwhat caused it and for whom it was the loudest sound – along with cannon or large church bells – they ever heard. How can most of us, who rarely hear bells, recapture the ‘kind of vertigo’ produced by the sheer intensity of those church bells.1 Other sounds of the past, the rattle of swords and musketry or the cries of hawkers, have disappeared almost completely from our experience, and with them a whole range of day-to-day understandings. Even where the sounds are similar, they may have completely different connotations. The clip-clop of horses’ hooves today may evoke flowing silk dresses and frock coats, carriages and a genteel way of life that has disappeared. Yet when horses were everywhere the sound conjured up no such nostalgic images. Even when we can actually capture sounds from the past – Hitler’s speeches or the first radio recordings – they do not have 1 B.R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago and London, 1999), 49–50.