| This dissertation analyzes scientific attempts to measure human responses to noise in the United States since the 1920s. Noise, according to its generally accepted definition, is unwanted sound. The project of defining noise necessarily involves the evaluation of the wants of hearers. The problem of noise has historically involved public and legal debate about the place of industry in human life and has provoked conflicts internal to liberalism concerning the right of the subject to be free from nuisances and the potentially conflicting obligation to psychologically 'adjust' to noise when it stems from activities involving the public good. The difficulty of making judgments of hearers' wants has been confronted in various social arenas, from the courts, to musical performances, to engineering. Scientists and engineers have sought to provide a quantitative assessment of noise through the production of noise metrics. The analysis of these metrics provides an opportunity to understand what kind of objective answers have been sought to address the problem of noise and to demonstrate how noise measurements make sense of human experience and reflect larger cultural and economic values. The dissertation provides a close analysis of noise metrics themselves and the changing historical conditions that underpin their development, ranging from the public debates about noise and industrial expansion in cities in the 1920s to the formation of state and legal regulatory regimes concerning the environment in the 1960s and 70s. The analysis shows how competing conceptions of the person and her phenomenological make-up and social needs are woven into purportedly objective metrics. The argument I make is that cultural expectations of what people should experience of the industrial environment reinforce the demands of capital and that these cultural expectations are incorporated into the scientific work of measuring noise. Over time, from metric to metric, there is a continual build-up of the expectation that noise only matters when there is interruption to economic productivity or activity. What results is a relatively proscribed view of the hearing subject or even a complete occlusion of the subject as material demands become the primary determinant of the times and places of noise. |
