Goldsmith - Discord: the story of noise

MIKE GOLDSMITH

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX 2 6 DP ,
United Kingdom

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Mike Goldsmith 2012

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First Edition published in 2012
Impression: 1

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
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ISBN 9780199600687

Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives Plc

To the staff of the Acoustics Group,
National Physical Laboratory

I wish to thank the following for the very useful information they were so generous as to provide:

James P. Allen, Wilbur Professor of Egyptology at Brown University, for information on ancient Egyptian records, and for the translation cited on p. 21;

Dr Richard Barham, National Physical Laboratory, for information on recent environmental noise reduction projects;

Bernard Berry, BEL Acoustics, for material on the history of the National Physical Laboratory;

Alan Bloomfield, for information about EU noise projects;

Professor Philip Dickenson, Massey University, New Zealand, for information about US airbases and their responses to noise problems in the 1940s;

Chris Clark, Head of Digital Research at the British Library, for information about 1940s London soundscapes;

Professor Ed Greitzer, MIT, USA, for information about the Silent Aircraft Initiative;

Chris Hanson-Abbott, founder chairman of Brigade Electronics plc and inventor of the white sound vehicle movement alarm, for material on p. 266;

Mark Hodnett, National Physical Laboratory, for information about the biological effects of ultrasound;

Dr James Hileman, MIT, USA, for information about the Silent Aircraft Initiative;

Paul D. Jepson, BVMS, Ph.D. DipECZM (Wildlife Population Health), MRCVS, European Veterinary Specialist in Wildlife Population ;

Mark Jiggins, Hoare Lea Acoustics, for guidance about wind farms;

Garret Keitzer, for information about early medical accounts of noise;

Lisa Lavia, Managing Director, Noise Abatement Society, for material about John Connell, including Figs 34, 35, and 36 (Courtesy of the Noise Abatement Society, a registered charity in the United Kingdom. Established in 1959, the Societys remit is to help find solutions to noise pollution problems which it does through working with diverse stakeholders to find innovative, practical and holistic solutions. The Societys founder, John Connell OBE, lobbied the Noise Abatement Act through parliament in 1960 making noise a statutory nuisance in the UK for the first time);

Gianluca Memola, National Physical Laboratory, for information and discussion about EU research projects;

Richard Payne, for information about FSN;

Stephen Robinson, National Physical Laboratory, for material and advice concerning underwater noise;

Adam Shaw, National Physical Laboratory, for information about new medical uses of ultrasound.

Why are you writing a book about the history of NOISE?, people asked. And what is noise anyway?, they didnt add. But perhaps they should have. Noise is not quite as simple as it sounds, as we shall soon discover. But first: why a noise book? Because noise is more relevant todayand will be more relevant tomorrowthan ever before, thanks in part to the growth of its sources and in part to the more concerted efforts of governments to quash it. Not that quashing is always relevant: noise is by no means always bad.

Probably what most people mean when they use the word is unwanted soundand indeed this definition of noise has been in common use since the Middle Ages, or perhaps even earlier. But unwanted sound is hardly a definition likely to satisfy a philosopher or a lawyer: is