Age of Noise

The Age of Noise in Britain offers a new perspective on modern Britain, showing that everyday sounds were central to the negotiation of modernity.

From traffic noise to air raids, everyday sounds elicited new ways of thinking about being modern in twentieth-century Britain. Commentators writing in the period 1914-1945 described themselves as living in the ‘age of noise’. They pointed to the new sound environment created by cars, radios, gramophones, and mechanised warfare.

For better or worse, they were convinced that these sounds were re-tuning the human mind and body to the new frequencies of the modern world. The Age of Noise in Britain examines the hopes and fears of those who lived through the ‘age of noise’.

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