Where, when, how, and by whom noise is apprehended, evaluated, and
suppressed, Hillel Schwartz has argued, is “never so much a question of the intensity of sound as of the intensity of relationships: between deep past, past, and present, imagined or experienced; between one generation and the next, gods or mortals; between country and city, urb and suburb; between one class and another; between the sexes; between Neanderthals and other humans.”103 These are the words I have returned to, again and again, while reading complaints about bell practices, sifting through theoretical perspectives on the politics of noise abatement, and probing the boundaries of
hypothetical noise in my own thought experiments. I still have many questions. Here is what I have concluded (so far).
First, if noise is about relationships (and I agree with Schwartz that it is), the question of why listeners complain will seldom have a simple answer. Consequently, I
have not attempted to identify a “real” or “most important” reason why American audiences opposed the noise of the funeral, fire, or churchgoing bell. Instead, I have approached each controversy with the goal of accounting for as many variables—and, by extension, relationships—as present themselves. These include:
• social and cultural factors: the class, ethnicity, sex, or religion of the parties sounding, authorizing, responding, or otherwise benefitting from a bell practice • perceived properties of sound: volume, duration, pitch, timbre104
• performance: manner of sounding (ringing, tolling, chiming), number of bells (a solitary bell vs. a chime or a ring), regularity (steady vs. erratic sounding)
• temporal, spatial, and material context: time of day, day of week, proximity to an offending belfry, the surrounding built environment
• interference with activities and routines: sleeping, listening, talking, concentrating • physiological and psychological conditions of the complainant
• personal histories between complainants and the parties sounding the bell
Behind every conflict, if not every argument, were expectations regarding the purpose of the contested bell practice: the work it should accomplish and the associations it should evoke. These expectations were different for each practice, and they are especially important to consider when interpreting arguments based on utility or necessity.
In attributing complaints about unwanted sound to an array of context-specific variables, I have grappled with questions similar to those addressed by Ronda L. Sewald
104. Stephen McAdams and Albert Bregman remarked that timbre (sometimes called “tone color” or “texture”) “tends to be the psychoacoustician’s multidimensional waste-basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or loudness.” Most definitions are indeed roundabout; the Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, defines timbre as “the character or quality of a musical sound or voice as distinct from its pitch and intensity.” From an auditory perspective, it is the quality by which a blindfolded listener would distinguish between a trumpet and a bagpipe, if both instruments played a note of the same pitch and volume. Stephen McAdams and Albert Bregman, “Hearing Musical Streams,” Computer Music Journal 3, no. 4 (December 1979), 34; Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd edition (Oxford University Press, 2013).
regarding the politics of noise abatement. The prevailing model for understanding conflicts over unwanted sound, Sewald pointed out, conceives both noisemaking and noise abatement as political activities: subjugated groups employ sound strategically in expressions of resistance and protest, and powerful institutions and persons seek to stifle less powerful dissonant voices. Extreme proponents of this view (Sewald cited Jacque Attali’s Noise as the seminal articulation) understand noise abatement as an activity invariably perpetrated by powerful actors upon disempowered noisemakers. Taken further, complaints about unwanted sound are ultimately about unwanted people, and to implicate other factors lends validity to intolerant and prejudiced positions. Citing counter-examples from previous scholarship as well as her own research on soundscape conflicts, Sewald identified three additional distributions of power in past noise
abatement activities: (1) professional and middle-class reformers opposing noise to protect the hearing of lower-class factory workers, (2) neighbors of similar demographics contesting the boundaries of private soundscapes, and (3) demographically diverse captive audiences, such as public transit riders, seeking relief from music and messages delivered by corporate and political interests.105 Further, while acknowledging that forms of bigotry are clearly implicated in many noise abatement efforts, Sewald cautioned against assuming that all complaints about noise invariably spring from intolerance or prejudice, arguing that a variety of sonic, contextual, and personal factors may influence how a listener interprets a sound. In particular, Sewald emphasized that sound—
105. Sewald, “Darker Side of Sound,” esp. 1-37, 477-81; Sewald, “The Untidy Reality of Complaints About Music,” Anthropology News 51 (9) (December 2010); Sewald, “Forced Listening.”
especially at loud volumes, extreme frequencies, or lengthy durations—is capable of inflicting measurable physical and psychological harm.106
Distributions of power in conflicts over bell practices varied. Confrontations over the churchgoing bell were often waged by parties of similar demographics. The first lawsuit brought against church bells in the US (addressed in Chapter 5) was filed against a wealthy Episcopal congregation by a contingent of neighbors predominated by wealthy Episcopalians—several of whom paid pew rent to the defendants. Efforts to silence the funeral and fire bells hew more closely to the model of powerful institutions suppressing less powerful noise makers, with an important caveat. The privilege of sounding a bell— for any reason—was regulated closely by political and religious authorities, and, with the exception of death knells and funeral tolling, bells sounded on behalf of collectives rather than individuals. Consequently, the noisemakers criticized for sounding bells were
significantly less vulnerable than street musicians, peddlers, or other disempowered groups regularly targeted by noise abatement efforts.107 But thinking in terms of opposing sides, squaring off against each other in orderly battles, misses the combat style of conflicts over bells. They are better described as opportunistic skirmishes. Almost always, more than two interests entered (or were pulled into) the fray, and participants often argued for or against practices for different reasons. At times, persons and
106. Sewald extensively reviews the harmful possibilities of sound in Chapter 2 of her dissertation. See Sewald, “Darker Side of Sound.”
107. R. Murray Schafer cited the sound of church bells as the seminal example of “Sacred Noise”: sound made without fear of censure. According to Schafer, secular industrialists acquired this privilege with the arrival of modernity, and this led to the demise of the hi-fi soundscape with its favorable signal-to-noise ratio. Isaac Weiner developed Schafer’s concept of Sacred Noise extensively when interpreting late- nineteenth-century controversies over the sound of US church bells. Schafer, Soundscape, 76; Weiner,
institutions who adamantly opposed each other on many matters found common ground on the subject of discontinuing or defending bell practices.
Whether attempts to silence unwanted sound are always or only motivated by intolerance is a question I leave to philosophers. Complaints prompted exclusively by either social prejudice or sonic excess are difficult to find outside the rarefied plane of hypothetical scenarios. Nineteenth-century Americans seldom expressed their views on the volume, timing, duration, or aesthetics of bell practices without commenting on the morality, fortitude, piety, intelligence, industriousness, or sobriety of members of a class, ethnicity, sex, religion, political party, or generation. My goal, in investigating past disputes over the funeral, fire, and churchgoing bells, is to better comprehend the complex, messy, and partially articulated relationships between social, sonic, and contextual factors and to understand how varieties of intolerance and prejudice have manifested in disputes about noise.