This is like a sonic love letter to Luigi Russolo…
This is like a sonic love letter to Luigi Russolo…
The Roaring Twenties: An interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City
Writing from the depths of the Depression in 1932, F. Scott Fitzgerald looked back on the decade that had roared. He recalled that roar as so characteristic, so ubiquitous as to be remarkably unremarkable. Fitzgerald’s contemporaries may have been less blasé, but many shared his belief that New York was defined by its din. In 1920, for example, a Japanese governor visiting the city for the first time noted, “My first impression of New York was its noise.” While initially appalled by the clamor that surrounded him, he soon became enamored of the task of listening to the noise and identifying individual sounds within the cacophony. “When I know what they mean,” he explained to a reporter, “I will understand civilization.”