An Auscultative Age

D

uring the massive urbanisation and industrialization of 19^th century Europe, urbanites became exposed to a host of new sounds and intensified soundscapes that effected their understanding of urbanity and urban existence as well as their mental and physical health. In his seminal work on the Victorian Soundscape, John Picker identified the era as a particular “auscultative” age. An era devoted to sonic experiences, to “close listening” and to auscultation “not only in the medical sense initiated by the stethoscope […] and perfected by the microphone […] but also in the sense of careful listening to a world at large— and in flux” (Picker 2003, introduction). This essay explores the interplay between sound, mobility and perceptions of noise and sonic transgression using urban acoustics, the tramway and figure of the aural flâneur as lenses.

The mobility of millions of internal and external migrants drove the demographic and geographic transition of the 19^th century city. Overall, the share of Europeans living in cities with more than 5.000 people grew from 10 % in 1800 to 29 % in 1890 and 41 % in 1910. The total numbers of European urbanites rose from 19 million to 127 million in the same period. The growth of urban populations was accompanied by a similar surge in the built area that created “street canyons” in which sounds from street, workshops and home reflected and rebounded against walls made entirely out of stone and iron and without the muting and soundproofing wooden elements of the past. The high buildings “held together and amplified” urban sounds. The city turned into a “stone vessel… from which noise cannot escape” (quotes from Payer 2007, p. 775). The new layout of roads and buildings motivated by increasing attention to the flow of people and commodities through the city, had the spread of background noise as an important sonic side effect.

The Tramway

The transformation of the urban plan and materiality accompanied an increasing interurban and intraurban mobility. The separation of work and living areas gave birth to mass-commuting as a new urban practice and to new forms of public and private transport like omnibuses, bicycles and – first and foremost - tramways. From 1870 to 1910 annual use of public transportation such as hired carriages, trams and the Stadtbahn in Vienna rose from 20 to 131 trips per person. In 1913 the tram system alone carried 322.6 million passengers on 3,001 electric streetcars (Payer 2007, p. 776-77). A similarly development can be found in Copenhagen. Here the number of tram trips per inhabitant pr. year rose from 13 in 1866 to 84 in 1898 and 176 in 1912-13 and the extent of the tramway-system from 8,8 km in 1866 to 95 km in 1912-13 (Røgind 1913, p. 617).

Sonically, the bell signals and squealing of the tram became an acoustic symbol of the modern metropolis, that in a four- or five-minute interval “saluted the city” from early morning to late night. At the central station in Copenhagen, arriving passengers experienced ”the noise and rattling of trams, omnibuses, and the ringing and clanging of bells – laughter and footsteps and voices and yells, the barking of dogs and the stomping of horses. A confusing, bubbling, sound of life [from] a Copenhagen, that never sleeps!” (Kjøbenhavn, December 11, 1892, my translation).

For some urbanites the sounds of the trams turned into habitual homeliness. The tram bell as a recurring – soothing – element in the rhythm of modern urban life is found in many journalistic and literary portrayals: “The buzzing noise of the city below her feet and the constant, distant rumbling of the carriages, comforted and calmed her, along with the bells of the approaching and disappearing trams […]” (Bang 1883, p. 128).

In the writings of authors like Herman Bang (1857-1912) and Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) in late 19^th century Copenhagen, the tramway-sounds, particularly its bells, work as a distinct reminder to their readers that the plot is situated in Copenhagen, the only big city in 19^th century Denmark and until the early 20^th century also the only Danish city with an extensive tram system. The tram bells are rarely central to the plot of the novels, but work as a new signal sound or even sound mark of Copenhagen. The sound of bells attached to a mobile, repetitive infrastructure turned them into a significant part of the soundscape and chronobiology of the streets and neighborhoods it passed through.

For some the tram was a sonic intruder and its “whimpering howls” and “infernal noise” a recurring transgression of their “right” to silence. A complaint to the Viennese anti-noise society from the early 20^th century describes “the bell signals of the Viennese trams [as] the most hideous of any city in the world. They screech brutally, in a provocative, tormenting, and offensive way.” At the turn of 20^th century the extensive time schedule and spread of the tramway in the suburbs was cause of concern. Wilhelm Stekel, a Vienesse doctor, wrote: “Far into the hours of sleep, the noise goes on and on. The rattling of the vehicles, the buzzing and groaning of the electric tram, they keep our brains alert even while we are asleep” (Payer 2007, p. 778 and 784).

Neurasthenia and Noise

Stekel’s comment is related to the mapping of neurasthenia and overstimulation of the sensory apparatus of urbanites carried out by doctors and psychiatrists like the Italian neuro-anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza, author of the bestseller Secolo nevroso (1887). To these intellectuals, office clerks and middle-class women were particularly susceptible to nervous breakdowns in the booming cities, as their class, gender, sedentary tasks, and social pretentions made them vulnerable to the sensorium of urban life. Neurasthenia soon turned into a fashionable diagnosis of the stressful nature of modern life that could affect most people. Even factory workers and middling to poor tenants (Parby 2021, p. 56-59).

In Copenhagen, one landlord complained that improper planning regulations created a permanent threat of noisy industries and workshops moving in without warning. From early morning to early evening “machines and noisy work [created] an unhealthy environment that affected the health of all neighbors in a more or less nerve-wracking fashion” (Kjøbenhavn, August 14, 1894).  

Aural Flânerie

Not all 19^th century urbanites turned into noise complainers or victims of sensory overstimulation. The era also saw the development of what Jonathan Sterne termed “virtuoso listeners” among doctors and telegraph operators, who were introduced to new ways of communicating and listening to bodies that in turn gave birth to new listening regimes (Sterne 2003, p. 137). The 19^th century version of the flaneur also harbored an, often ignored, aural dimension.

In this era, flânerie became increasingly tied to a uniquely modern urban sensibility embedded in the crowds of the modern metropolis. To Charles Baudelaire the flaneur was a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life. The composer Victor Fournel compared the flaneur to a “mobile and passionate daguerreotype” (Fournel 1858, p. 268). But the modern flaneur was more than an “untouchable mobile gaze” and rather “bathed in a multitude of sounds and sights” that he/she “organized into a panorama that presents the attractions in an orderly narrative” (Boutin 2015, p. 11-13). The aural flaneur interpreted the city as concert and gave musical form to what others experienced as disorganized noise (Boutin 2015, p. 17ff).

Copenhagen-based authors staged themselves as observant listeners to the changing sonic landscape of the city in a similar fashion. As in this passage from Herman Bang’s (1887, p. 17f, my translation) novel Stuk (Stucco):

The crowd broke out of all gates, poured life and noise down the stairs and forward through the streets […] row after row singing. At Kongens Nytorv the crowds coagulated into smaller, noisy and merry islands from which joyful trams broke out and away each in their own direction along the trails. Now the noise separated into the awaiting street mouths. Weaker and weaker it rolled forward through the vast silence of the houses; murmuring through a gate, down an alley – as if the silent gray rows of stone slowly absorbed it.

The sounds interpreted here are amassed sounds (the voices, laughs and steps of the theatre audience pouring out into the streets) and the acoustic quality of the built city. Later in the novel, the protagonist Berg, recall witnessing the workers building “the new Copenhagen” on the old ramparts, the air full of “clanging hammer blows and song, as reels turned and wheelbarrows shedded” (Bang 1887, p. 70). Bang also explores machine noises, and the sound of factory and steamboat pipes in the novel as well as intensified traditional sounds of rumbling wagons and thousands of clogged feet of workers resounding on the pavement during rush hour. All are interpreted as signs of Copenhagen’s metropolization and (vain?) big city ambitions.

The factory steam pipes calling workers to work and indicating the work schedule throughout the day reappears in this passage from Henrik Pontoppidan’s (1905, I, p. 104, my translation) novel Lucky Per:

And now the factory pipes began to sound. […] Initially one heard a couple from Nørrebro, then one from Christianshavn, finally they sounded from everywhere – a polyphonic rooster call, the matutina [Ottesang] of a new age, that will eventually overcome all the ghosts of superstition and darkness.

In this passage the protagonist turns the sounds of the pipes into harbingers of progress. Church bells of a new age devoted to innovation and industry. In the style of Fournel and other aural flaneurs Pontoppidan rearranges the disorganized noise of industrialization and the modern city into a meaningful concert. The sound is endowed with a solemn air of completing the new city and its imagined acoustic communities.

References

Bang, H. (1883) Fædra. Copenhagen: J. H. Schubothes Forlag.

Bang, H. (1887) Stuk. Copenhagen: J. H. Schubothes Forlag.

Boutin, A. (2015) City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth Century Paris. UI Press.

Fournel, Victor (1858) Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris. Paris: Delahays.

Parby, J.I. (2021) ”Fremskridtets lyd? Lydrevolutionen og håndteringen af støj under Københavns industrialisering ca. 1850-1910” in Kulturstudier, 12,  2, pp. 41-71. Available here.

Payer, P. (2007) “The Age of Noise – Early Reactions in Vienna” Journal of Urban History, 33:5, pp. 773-793. doi.org/10.1177/0096144207301420

Picker, J. (2003) Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: OUP.

Pontoppidan, H. (1905) Lykke-Per, vol. I-III. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.

Røgind, S. (1913) “Københavns Sporveje gennem 50 Aar” in Nationaløkonomisk Tidsskrift, 3, 21, pp. 596-619.

Sterne, J. (2003) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jakob Ingemann Parby is curator, ph.d., senior researcher at the Museum of Copenhagen, P. I. of the research project Sounds of Copenhagen. The essay springs from an upcoming book on the sonic and aural revolution of 19^th century Copenhagen.