Stories in sound

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Sound, a natural human instinct, has had an intimate and powerful role in history, but has been overpowered by the written word. The lack of recorded sounds before the 19th century has left the focus on the written word and paintings as the main sources for history.

British academic David Hendy is attempting to shift the focus on sound to highlight the “rattle and hum” of human history with his 30-part radio series for the BBC called, ‘Noise: A Human History’. Covering human history from over 100,000 years, Professor Hendy, of the University of Sussex, is exploring human interaction with sound and its effect on events and people. A book, ‘Noise: A History of Sound and Listening’, has also been launched along with the series. “Sound is more than just acoustics. Noise, for example, is a sound that someone, somewhere, doesn’t want to hear. So, noise gives us a route in to the story of human existence. It brings sound to a human level – more of a felt experience and one that’s about power and struggle, life and death, pleasure and pain, the need to hear and be heard,” explains Prof Hendy.
The series, which started in March, is broadcasting sounds that have never been broadcast before. The series has drawn from the sound collection of the British Library, which has some 3.5 million sounds from across the world, dating from 1857.
There may be no recordings, but Prof Hendy’s team recreated the sounds of shamanistic trance music of cave-dwellers and even the sounds reverberating in Neolithic burial chambers. “Sound has always had a significant impact on the way we understand the world around us,” he explains, in an interview with the BB History magazine. “Because sound is so hard to define, it’s always had this magical quality. The people who, 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, left us those beautiful pieces of cave art in southern France, seem to have sensed this. We’ve established that art is often found in the parts of the caves with the best echoes, so maybe artists attributed these noises to a supernatural source, and regarded their paintings as a means of representing these sound.”
The series will highlight a different element of human experience, like the journey of music along with slaves from Africa to the Americas, impact of urbanisation on noise that focuses on ancient Rome, industrialised London and bizarre pre-revolution Paris where noisy cats were massacred. Violence is highlighted with the noise of WWI trenches and tragic voicemail recordings of 9/11 victims in the United States.