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 to sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for a trajectory of changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise.
From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epic to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly-mythic Echo to loudspeaker feedback, Making Noise follows -unwanted sound- on its path through terrains domestic and industrial, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage of this tour de force, crafted in the inimitable prose of one of America-s most innovative cultural historians, Schwartz widens and deepens our sense of the reverberations of soundful lives, urban, suburban, rural, or lost. Never so much a question of the intensity of sounds as of the i
