Author: Joseph McCormack
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 139432426X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Book Description
Teaches managers and leaders to cut through the static and hone their focusing skills In the current digital age, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to stay focused. Smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and other devices constantly vie for our attention. In both business and life, we are constantly bombarded with tweets, likes, mentions, and a constant stream of information. The inability to pay attention impacts learning, parenting, prioritizing, and leading. Not surprisingly, attention spans have gotten shorter. Already being pulled in a dozen directions every minute, managers and business leaders often struggle to address important issues and focus on everything that needs attention. Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus teaches managers and leaders how to help themselves and others sharpen their focusing skills. In this follow-up to his first book Brief—the proven, step-by-step approach to clear, concise, and effective communication—author Joseph McCormack helps readers cut through the static and devote their attention to what is important. This engaging, informative book will help you: Apply effective, real-world techniques to hone your focus and reduce interference Learn the lessons taught to organizations such as Harley-Davidson, BMO Harris Bank, MasterCard, and the US Army Understand how modern technology can actually strengthen your focus if used correctly Avoid becoming a casualty of “weapons of mass distraction” Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus is a valuable resource for leaders and managers seeking to develop laser-sharp focus and apply it to everything you do.
Noise
Author: Joseph McCormack
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 139432426X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Book Description
Teaches managers and leaders to cut through the static and hone their focusing skills In the current digital age, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to stay focused. Smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and other devices constantly vie for our attention. In both business and life, we are constantly bombarded with tweets, likes, mentions, and a constant stream of information. The inability to pay attention impacts learning, parenting, prioritizing, and leading. Not surprisingly, attention spans have gotten shorter. Already being pulled in a dozen directions every minute, managers and business leaders often struggle to address important issues and focus on everything that needs attention. Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus teaches managers and leaders how to help themselves and others sharpen their focusing skills. In this follow-up to his first book Brief—the proven, step-by-step approach to clear, concise, and effective communication—author Joseph McCormack helps readers cut through the static and devote their attention to what is important. This engaging, informative book will help you: Apply effective, real-world techniques to hone your focus and reduce interference Learn the lessons taught to organizations such as Harley-Davidson, BMO Harris Bank, MasterCard, and the US Army Understand how modern technology can actually strengthen your focus if used correctly Avoid becoming a casualty of “weapons of mass distraction” Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus is a valuable resource for leaders and managers seeking to develop laser-sharp focus and apply it to everything you do.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 139432426X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Book Description
Teaches managers and leaders to cut through the static and hone their focusing skills In the current digital age, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to stay focused. Smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and other devices constantly vie for our attention. In both business and life, we are constantly bombarded with tweets, likes, mentions, and a constant stream of information. The inability to pay attention impacts learning, parenting, prioritizing, and leading. Not surprisingly, attention spans have gotten shorter. Already being pulled in a dozen directions every minute, managers and business leaders often struggle to address important issues and focus on everything that needs attention. Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus teaches managers and leaders how to help themselves and others sharpen their focusing skills. In this follow-up to his first book Brief—the proven, step-by-step approach to clear, concise, and effective communication—author Joseph McCormack helps readers cut through the static and devote their attention to what is important. This engaging, informative book will help you: Apply effective, real-world techniques to hone your focus and reduce interference Learn the lessons taught to organizations such as Harley-Davidson, BMO Harris Bank, MasterCard, and the US Army Understand how modern technology can actually strengthen your focus if used correctly Avoid becoming a casualty of “weapons of mass distraction” Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus is a valuable resource for leaders and managers seeking to develop laser-sharp focus and apply it to everything you do.
Noise Thinks the Anthropocene
Author: Aaron Zwintscher
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Book Description
In an increasingly technologized and connected world, it seems as if noise must be increasing. Noise, however, is a complicated term with a complicated history. Noise can be traced through structures of power, theories of knowledge, communication, and scientific practice, as well as through questions of art, sound, and music. Thus, rather than assume that it must be increasing, this work has focused on better understanding the various ways that noise is defined, what that noise can do, and how we can use noise as a strategically political tactic. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene is a textual experiment in noise poetics that uses the growing body of research into noise as source material. It is an experiment in that it results from indeterminate means, alternative grammar, and experimental thinking. The outcome was not predetermined. It uses noise to explain, elucidate, and evoke (akin to other poetic forms) within the textual milieu in a manner that seeks to be less determinate and more improvisational than conventional writing. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene argues that noise poetics is a necessary form for addressing political inequality, coexistence with the (nonhuman) other, the ecological crisis, and sustainability because it approaches these issues as a system of interconnected fragments and excesses and thus has the potential to reach or envision solutions in novel ways.
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Book Description
In an increasingly technologized and connected world, it seems as if noise must be increasing. Noise, however, is a complicated term with a complicated history. Noise can be traced through structures of power, theories of knowledge, communication, and scientific practice, as well as through questions of art, sound, and music. Thus, rather than assume that it must be increasing, this work has focused on better understanding the various ways that noise is defined, what that noise can do, and how we can use noise as a strategically political tactic. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene is a textual experiment in noise poetics that uses the growing body of research into noise as source material. It is an experiment in that it results from indeterminate means, alternative grammar, and experimental thinking. The outcome was not predetermined. It uses noise to explain, elucidate, and evoke (akin to other poetic forms) within the textual milieu in a manner that seeks to be less determinate and more improvisational than conventional writing. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene argues that noise poetics is a necessary form for addressing political inequality, coexistence with the (nonhuman) other, the ecological crisis, and sustainability because it approaches these issues as a system of interconnected fragments and excesses and thus has the potential to reach or envision solutions in novel ways.
Making Noise
Author: Hillel Schwartz
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9781935408123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Listening across millennia, a cultural historian explores the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical--and intriguing--as the original Babel. When did the "silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud? How loud is too loud, and says who? Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise. From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback, from shouts frozen in Rabelaisian air to the squawk of loudspeakers and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows "unwanted sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic and industrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage, readers can hear the cultural reverberations of the historical soundwork of actresses, admen, anthropologists, astronomers, builders, composers, dentists, economists, engineers, filmmakers, firemen, grammar school teachers, jailers, nurses, oceanographers, pastors, philosophers, poets, psychologists, and the writers of children's books. Drawing upon such diverse sources as the archives of antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks and dental drills, letters and daybooks of physicists and physicians, military manuals and training films, travel diaries and civil defense pamphlets, as well as museum collections of bells, ear trumpets, megaphones, sirens, stethoscopes, and street organs, Schwartz traces the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel. Endnotes and bibliography are not included in the physical book but are available online at the MIT Press Web site.
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9781935408123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Listening across millennia, a cultural historian explores the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical--and intriguing--as the original Babel. When did the "silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud? How loud is too loud, and says who? Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise. From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback, from shouts frozen in Rabelaisian air to the squawk of loudspeakers and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows "unwanted sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic and industrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage, readers can hear the cultural reverberations of the historical soundwork of actresses, admen, anthropologists, astronomers, builders, composers, dentists, economists, engineers, filmmakers, firemen, grammar school teachers, jailers, nurses, oceanographers, pastors, philosophers, poets, psychologists, and the writers of children's books. Drawing upon such diverse sources as the archives of antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks and dental drills, letters and daybooks of physicists and physicians, military manuals and training films, travel diaries and civil defense pamphlets, as well as museum collections of bells, ear trumpets, megaphones, sirens, stethoscopes, and street organs, Schwartz traces the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel. Endnotes and bibliography are not included in the physical book but are available online at the MIT Press Web site.
The Rest Is Noise
Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706
Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706
Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Noise
Author: David Hendy
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006228309X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
What if history had a sound track? What would it tell us about ourselves? Based on a thirty-part BBC Radio series and podcast, Noise explores the human dramas that have revolved around sound at various points in the last 100,000 years, allowing us to think in fresh ways about the meaning of our collective past. Though we might see ourselves inhabiting a visual world, our lives have always been hugely influenced by our need to hear and be heard. To tell the story of sound—music and speech, but also echoes, chanting, drumbeats, bells, thunder, gunfire, the noise of crowds, the rumbles of the human body, laughter, silence, conversations, mechanical sounds, noisy neighbors, musical recordings, and radio—is to explain how we learned to overcome our fears about the natural world, perhaps even to control it; how we learned to communicate with, understand, and live alongside our fellow beings; how we've fought with one another for dominance; how we've sought to find privacy in an increasingly noisy world; and how we've struggled with our emotions and our sanity. Oratory in ancient Rome was important not just for the words spoken but for the sounds made—the tone, the cadence, the pitch of the voice—how that voice might have been transformed by the environment in which it was heard and how the audience might have responded to it. For the Native American tribes first encountering the European colonists, to lose one's voice was to lose oneself. In order to dominate the Native Americans, European colonists went to great effort to silence them, to replace their "demonic" "roars" with the more familiar "bugles, speaking trumpets, and gongs." Breaking up the history of sound into prehistoric noise, the age of oratory, the sounds of religion, the sounds of power and revolt, the rise of machines, and what he calls our "amplified age," Hendy teases out continuities and breaches in our long relationship with sound in order to bring new meaning to the human story.
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006228309X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
What if history had a sound track? What would it tell us about ourselves? Based on a thirty-part BBC Radio series and podcast, Noise explores the human dramas that have revolved around sound at various points in the last 100,000 years, allowing us to think in fresh ways about the meaning of our collective past. Though we might see ourselves inhabiting a visual world, our lives have always been hugely influenced by our need to hear and be heard. To tell the story of sound—music and speech, but also echoes, chanting, drumbeats, bells, thunder, gunfire, the noise of crowds, the rumbles of the human body, laughter, silence, conversations, mechanical sounds, noisy neighbors, musical recordings, and radio—is to explain how we learned to overcome our fears about the natural world, perhaps even to control it; how we learned to communicate with, understand, and live alongside our fellow beings; how we've fought with one another for dominance; how we've sought to find privacy in an increasingly noisy world; and how we've struggled with our emotions and our sanity. Oratory in ancient Rome was important not just for the words spoken but for the sounds made—the tone, the cadence, the pitch of the voice—how that voice might have been transformed by the environment in which it was heard and how the audience might have responded to it. For the Native American tribes first encountering the European colonists, to lose one's voice was to lose oneself. In order to dominate the Native Americans, European colonists went to great effort to silence them, to replace their "demonic" "roars" with the more familiar "bugles, speaking trumpets, and gongs." Breaking up the history of sound into prehistoric noise, the age of oratory, the sounds of religion, the sounds of power and revolt, the rise of machines, and what he calls our "amplified age," Hendy teases out continuities and breaches in our long relationship with sound in order to bring new meaning to the human story.
Noise
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 031645138X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 429
Book Description
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the coauthor of Nudge, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments and how to make better ones—"a tour de force” (New York Times). Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients—or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different interviewers at the same firm make different decisions about indistinguishable job applicants—or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same interviewer, or the same customer service agent makes different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions. Packed with original ideas, and offering the same kinds of research-based insights that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment—and what we can do about it.
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 031645138X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 429
Book Description
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the coauthor of Nudge, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments and how to make better ones—"a tour de force” (New York Times). Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients—or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different interviewers at the same firm make different decisions about indistinguishable job applicants—or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same interviewer, or the same customer service agent makes different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions. Packed with original ideas, and offering the same kinds of research-based insights that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment—and what we can do about it.
The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want
Author: Garret Keizer
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 9781610391108
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Noise is usually defined as unwanted sound: loud music from a neighbor, the honk of a taxicab, the roar of a supersonic jet. But as Garret Keizer illustrates in this probing examination, noise is as much about what we want as about what we seek to avoid. In a journey that leads us from the primeval Tanzanian veldt to wind farms in Maine, Keizer invites us to listen to noise in history, in popular culture, and not least of all in our own backyards. He follows noise throughout history and across the globe. He considers what it has to tell us about today's most pressing issues, from social inequality to climate change. The result is guaranteed to change how we hear the world, and how we measure our own personal volume within it.
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 9781610391108
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Noise is usually defined as unwanted sound: loud music from a neighbor, the honk of a taxicab, the roar of a supersonic jet. But as Garret Keizer illustrates in this probing examination, noise is as much about what we want as about what we seek to avoid. In a journey that leads us from the primeval Tanzanian veldt to wind farms in Maine, Keizer invites us to listen to noise in history, in popular culture, and not least of all in our own backyards. He follows noise throughout history and across the globe. He considers what it has to tell us about today's most pressing issues, from social inequality to climate change. The result is guaranteed to change how we hear the world, and how we measure our own personal volume within it.
Theatre Noise
Author: Lynne Kendrick
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443837202
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of ‘noise’ which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust. Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and ‘aerodynamic’ signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance. ‘Theatre noise’ is a new term which captures a contemporary, agitatory acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience, the political in produced noises. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to ‘noise’ in this book – by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443837202
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of ‘noise’ which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust. Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and ‘aerodynamic’ signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance. ‘Theatre noise’ is a new term which captures a contemporary, agitatory acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience, the political in produced noises. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to ‘noise’ in this book – by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions.
Deadly Class Deluxe Edition Volume 1: Noise Noise Noise (New Edition)
Author: Rick Remender
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781534322561
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 440
Book Description
Collecting the first three arcs of RICK REMENDER and WES CRAIG'sdark, violent and twistedly humorous story of a group of damaged teens enrolledin a secret high school, training to become the world's greatestassassins. Bursting at the seams with sketches, concept art and other extras,this oversized 8x12" hardcover is the ultimate way to experience the 1980sunderground. Collecting DEADLY CLASS #1-16.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781534322561
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 440
Book Description
Collecting the first three arcs of RICK REMENDER and WES CRAIG'sdark, violent and twistedly humorous story of a group of damaged teens enrolledin a secret high school, training to become the world's greatestassassins. Bursting at the seams with sketches, concept art and other extras,this oversized 8x12" hardcover is the ultimate way to experience the 1980sunderground. Collecting DEADLY CLASS #1-16.
City of Noise
Author: Aimee Boutin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252039218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard. Aimée Boutin tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, Boutin braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As Boutin shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252039218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard. Aimée Boutin tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, Boutin braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As Boutin shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.