In early twentieth-century Britain, modernity became synonymous with the noise of technology. Increasing attention was paid to the sonic by-products of machines and their effects on the human body. Listening in to this chapter of sound history amplifies an often-silenced mode of response to technology and its impacts, as well as foregrounding multiple and competing discourses about noise and their indexing of cultural, social and political concerns. The designation of sound as noise is, of course, highly subjective: one person’s music is another’s torment. Noise can be both demonised and fetishised, signalling an intrusion into a soundscape understood as restorative or harmonious, or a means of protest and counter-cultural resistance. At once a sign of sociability, of existence (as vibration, everything is in noise), noise can also be unwanted, non-periodic sound, a form of torture or weaponry. Often associated with excess or background sound, noise slips between figure and ground as it carries or disrupts meaning.

While concerns about noise are ubiquitous, the modernist period saw an intensification of attention to noise and its mental and physical effects. Whether or not decibel levels rose, the first decades of the twentieth century were characterised by the proliferation of the sounds of technology. The rise of amplified and broadcast sound reshaped public and private soundscapes as well as modes of listening. Aptly called ‘the age of noise’ by Aldous Huxley, interwar Britain saw the publication of a plethora of books on noise. In one such publication, A. H. Davis describes how the ‘irregular rattle of machinery, the shriek of brakes, the crescendo of violently accelerating motorcycles, the shattering explosions of road-breaking drills, burst rudely upon our consciousness and stir our resentment and fears’ (Davis 1937: 5). Adjectival assault indicates the intrusive experience of shock and disturbance associated with mechanical sound. With the advent in the 1920s of a unit (the decibel) and machines (audiometers) with which to measure sound intensity objectively, noise became something to be charted, analysed and controlled. Background sound became undesirable noise through its continual foregrounding. As Davis notes, these acoustical developments led to ‘an increasing consciousness of noise’ (Davis 1937: 4); they made a sonic phenomenon visible through charts and audiograms.

A week after the end of WWII, a nightingale begins to sing in the darkness of a northwest London park. ‘Figures of listeners’ appear in the nearby lighted windows. Part of the ‘emanations of peacetime’, the mellifluous whistles and trills transfix but also unsettle those within earshot emerging as they are from an auditory wartime regime of hyper-alert listening. The bird sings ‘into incredulity […] note after note from its throat stripped everything else to silence.’ This is Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘I Hear You Say So’ (1945), but in all her fiction, and her work as a broadcaster and writer for the BBC, Bowen had a keen ear for the acoustics of modernity, particularly the uncanny and troubling properties of found sound. In this story, too, given that the nightingale’s song is acousmatic – the tiny bird unseen – Bowen plays with the confusion between ‘absolute’ and reproduced sound.

This chapter attends to the transnational and multiracial nature of modernist writing in Britain, and the critical paradigms that have only recently made this archive fully visible and audible. Black and Asian writers, publishers, editors, and broadcasters were working within and across the cultural and political networks of literary London in this period. Theatres, bookshops, meeting halls, and boarding houses provided a generative topography for various forms of cultural production. Through exploring key texts – C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Una Marson’s The Moth and the Star, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Aubrey Menen’s The Prevalence of Witches – we can chart the global perspectives and histories that took writers to London and how these were transformed and structured by their encounters in the city. These texts, in both their subject-matter and experiments with language, voice, and register, as well as genre and literary mode, are products of movement between cultures, belief systems, and literary conventions. Their diverse oeuvres suggest the versatility required of colonial writers, but also their position at the meeting point of multiple literary and political traditions.