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This chapter introduces the main organization that promoted noise abatement in early twentieth-century Britain, the Anti-Noise League led by Thomas Horder, as well as the rise of self-help advice for those suffering from noise sensitivity. Because the League and its supporters mounted a medical critique of noise, the chapter situates noise abatement in its medical historical context, arguing that anti-noise advocates drew on the diagnostic paradigm of neurasthenia. They did so even though this category was increasingly outdated in medical terms following the rise of the new psychology. The use of neurasthenia limited the scientific credibility of noise abatement, but gave it powerful cultural purchase thanks to popular ideas about “nerves.”

This chapter examines the history of technological culture and how it is associated with the problem of noise. It tries to find the reason for the noise abatement approach becoming such a prolonged issue. The chapter finds that the noise abatement approach has been prolonged due to assumptions of noise being a part of technological advancements and that innovation has been emphasized more than efforts aimed at regulating or controlling noise. It reports the structure of certain solutions proposed in British, German, and Dutch noise abatement laws. The chapter also highlights some lessons on how to write a history of technological culture and proposes some alternative approaches to noise abatement.

This chapter takes the case study of the Second World War to trace the progress of the various “ways of hearing” outlined so far in the book. The chapter focusses on national sounds and national hearing as features of sonic modernity, tracing the war’s influence on attempts to shape the auditory space of the nation. It shows how the noise abatement movement dealt with the war, taking civil defence workers out of the city for quiet rest breaks in the countryside, and considers the meaning of different wartime sounds, such as bomb noise and church bells, to the wartime nation. The chapter argues that wartime citizens were situated as hearers and directed towards “healthy” ways to hear the war by different auditory experts.

This chapter elaborates on how anti-noise leagues in Britain and other regions of Western Europe exaggerated the issue of noise through conventions and group interactions to create awareness about the issue. It examines available literature on the socio-cultural history and sociological characteristic of sound to explain the most dominant cultural significance of noise and silence before the industrial revolution in the early twentieth century. The chapter also presents an overview of technology-related noise derived from typical quotations of some Western novels published before or during the formation of the noise abatement societies.

This chapter presents a case study investigating whether traffic noise from a new motorway will have adverse effects on the acoustic communication of a threatened charadriiform bird, the Eurasian stone-curlew (Burhinus oedicnemus). It also determines whether, and to what extent, noise control measures might be effective in ameliorating any negative impacts of noise on the birds. To this aim, the study calculates the impact on curlew communication for six different potential noise scenarios. It predicts the masking influence of traffic noise on acoustic communication based on following data: the level and spectral composition of noise; the sound pressure level (SPL) and spectral characteristics of the acoustic signals; the transmission properties of the signals in the respective habitat; and knowledge about the hearing capabilities of the concerned species in noise. The results show that for the new motorway, the target criterion of a less than 10% loss of communication area can only be reached by using the strongest noise abatement measure — a lowered motorway with steep earth walls at an overall height of 10m measured up from the pavement.