'Between Noise and Silence: Listening to the Modern City' chapter by James G. Mansell & Magda Stawarska-Beavan for 'Practising Place Creative & Critical Reflections on Place' book

Abstract

'Between Noise and Silence: Listening to the Modern City' chapter by James G. Mansell & Magda Stawarska-Beavan

Libraries, as ‘sanctuaries of quiet’, are unique places, both culturally and acoustically: they soundproof our thoughts from the distraction and the noise outside their walls. But they also co-erce us intobehaving quietly, amplifying the sounds we make beneath their domed acoustic chambers.

Manchester Central Library’s main reading room, placed on the top floor and filled with natural light, was designed to impose a state of quiet on the reader, with every small sound amplified by the unique acoustic of the domed roof.

The amplification of the personal sounds of page turning, typing, coughing etc. turns the ‘silent’ reader immersed in their private experience, into a performer within the public space of the reading room.

Using audio-visual recording, I investigate how the acoustic environment and the architecture of a building can affect our behaviour in a public space. James Mansell situates the building and its acoustic design in the historical context of early twentieth-century Britain’s ‘Age of Noise’, examining the Library as a ‘sanctuary of quiet’ in the soundscape of the modern industrial city. His research reveals the intentions and experiences of the library soundscape, placing it in the wider sound history of twentieth-century Manchester. Today’s library – embedded with technology – is full of discreet, barely audible sounds, which reveal its inner life.

My recordings delve into the different gradients of sound and silence, capturing the acoustic properties of the physical structure of the building, the sonic environment of the library created by its users, its technology and the noise of the city seeping in. Presenting the audio and visual body of my research gathered in the building and its surroundings, I explore the unique soundscape of the library – both protecting and controlling – and its relationship to the city whose voices it reverberates.

Drawing us back in time, Mansell situates these sounds in wider histories of urban subjectivities and listening. Together, we seek to explore the possibilities of artist-historical cross working, to investigate new ways to excavate the sounds of urban space through architectural resonance and through, archival remembrance.

Is today’s library still the oasis of quiet in the noisy city it was intended to be when it was built in the 1930s? Has the role of the library reading room changed with the changes of our reading habits?