Sound as Landscape

Abstract

This essay explores the role of sounds in the antebellum city, challenging our customary emphasis on the visible and the designed or intentional in the cultural landscape. It examines the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans interpreted ambient urban sounds, ranging from industrial noises to articulate speech, as parts of a continuum that paralleled the cues of social order and disorder. Then as now, discussion of urban environmental reform was inextricably entwined with ideals of identity and social roles. The implication is that any study of place—of the ways that environments can enrich the self and society—must engage these intangible aspects of urban experience.