You're Too Loud!

We take for granted our present-day ability to make ourselves as obnoxiously loud as we want to be. Yet being able to pump up the volume of an individual voice—to make it so deafening that it can easily reach all 140,000 ears of a stadium full of 70,000 people—is a brand-new development in the big picture of the human past.

Vibe with your favorite professional historian on this sonic journey through thousands of years. This amped-up episode brings you around the world, from the cities of ancient Greece and the Yucatán peninsula, through the expansive countryside of North America. Experience how Europe’s Scientific Revolution ultimately changed humans’ relations with sound itself. And discover some of the different, creative, occasionally bizarre ways through which people tried to raise their voices for the thousands of years prior to electronic amplification.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | Episode 9 | Doug Sofer

You’re Too Loud!

©2023 Doug Sofer

Cold Open

•   [Fade in theme]

•   Welcome to this earth-shattering [quaking sound] new podcast about how history helps you better understand the Strangeness of Now.

•   [background crowd noises fading in]

•   [pause]

•   Hey everyone, sorry for the background noise, but I’m recording this episode’s intro from my city’s nearby concert venue, Mega-Rad-Splosion Energy Drink and Albatross Mutual Supplemental Life Insurance Arena.

•   [pause]

•   I’m here because my favorite New York City-Based Alt-NuGroove-FunkBeat-metallo-crust-grind-core band is touring my town and they’re getting ready to start the show.

•   I’m so excited! Here we go!

•   [Fade out theme]

•   [Fade in iMovie “Recital Crowd Applause” & slowly blend to “Stadium Crowd Applause,” and “Stadium crowd chant.” Beginning on lowish volume and increasing volume as indicated below]

•   [New York accented rock star voice (NYARSV)]: Thank you! Thank you! How You Guys Doin!?!

•   [Crowd gets louder]

•   NYARSV:  Aw it’s great to be here—[long pause]

•   —in the awesomest city in all the world!

•   [Crowd gets even louder. Blend into increasingly loud “Arena Crowd Cheer.”]

•   NYARSV:  How ‘ya guys doin’ tonight?!?

•   [louder response]

•   NYARSV:  [Somewhat sing-songy] Oh—that’s not good enough.

•   [loudest, frenzied]

•   NYARSV:  No, no, no! When I say that’s not good enough, I mean: You people are too loud! What are you guys doin’ to me?

•   [loud still but maybe getting a teeny bit quieter]

•   NYARSV:  Seriously! Calm down!

•   [quieter]

•   NYARSV: Naw, you guys can do worse than that! Let’s try that again.

•   [Quieter still]

•   NYARSV:  No no—[very sing-songy] I CAN STILL hear you!

•   [Quieter still, blend back to smaller audiences, & eventually dies down to soft golf-like clapping]

•   [In a more conversational tone]

•   NYARSV: Yeah, now that’s more like it.

•   [pause]

•   NYARSV: [Whispering] Now we can start.

•   [Synthsperiment or equivalent from hi-hat section and then right into guitar part]

•   [Arena erupts again at max volume & then it fades out]

•   …

•   [fade in theme]

•   [pause]

•   Yeah, that band always puts on a heck of a show—but what a bizarre intro that was!

•   I don’t think I’ve ever heard a band asking their audience to quiet down like that, have you?

•   [pause]

•   I guess that’s because most music designed for youthful people—like you and me—is supposed to be loud!

•   [pause]

•   But you know, historically speaking, a single person asking a crowd to [yelling] make some noise! [/yelling. Brief swelling up & fading out of crowd]

•   —may be fairly new.

•   That’s because for nearly all of human history, a single person speaking on a stage who asked a crowd to be loud, had no chance whatsoever of being heard again once the people in the crowd started yelling their heads off.

•   A single voice just couldn’t compete with the voices of a dozen, or hundreds, or tens of thousands of cheering people.

•   [pause]

•   But all that started to change only about a century ago with the invention of electronic sound amplification.

•   Since then, loudspeaker technologies can make just one voice so incredibly loud so as to be able to out-louden even the loudest crowd—even one composed completely of loudmouths.

•   It’s pretty wild to realize that a hundred-year old person today would have born at a time when an electronically amplified voice was a novelty.

•   [pause]

•   And many more folks alive today would have had parents—and grandparents—and great-grandparents—who were around before any voice had ever been amplified electronically in all of human existence.

•   [pause]

•   But that’s not even the whole story. For many thousands of years, innovative people figured out other—non-electronic—ways to get louder too.

•   So pumping up the volume of human-made sounds, understanding the contexts of that loudening, and reflecting on these technologies’ implications—that’s what today’s episode is all about.

•   [pause]

•   And I hear you: Loud sounds can be startling—and so can thinking about them in historical context.

•   But you know what? It’s going to be all right. I’m a professionally trained historian and I’m here to help you sort out the signal from the noise.

•   My name is Doug Sofer, and I’m a weirdo—just like you!

Theme / call for sponsors

•   This podcast has been specially formulated for human beings! If you know any, tell them all about this show!

•   And if you’re one too and you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, head on over to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to learn about ways to support this one-of-a-kind history project! Thanks!

Classical amplification

•   Distinguishing between a person doing the speaking and the people doing the listening has been an obsession throughout history.

•   There’s the star of the show, and then there’s all the regular people.

•   And You Are A Weirdo—[divebomb]

•   —is the name of this podcast, so you’re in the right place to compare and contrast the different ways of being loud—from tried and true methods dating back millennia, to wackier ways only recently invented—the kinds of volumizing technologies that we present-day oddballs take for granted.

•   [pause]

•   This episode is called “You’re Too Loud!”

•   So what’s the oldest way to separate a sound-maker from a bunch of sound-listeners?

•   I mean, other than just yelling?

•   It’s a two-part solution that’s worked for thousands of years:

•   Step 1: Find a place where your voice sounds good.

•   Somewhere with a little echo—but not too much. Some location with good natural acoustics that accentuate the good parts of an orator’s voice.

•   Step 2: If you can’t find one of those places mentioned in Step 1, build your own.

•   [pause]

•   You can find many instances of that Step 2 approach in the cities of ancient Greece & ancient Rome.

•   A 2017 book by a professor of media studies and art history named Shannon Mattern, has the very cool title of 

•   [QE] Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media

•   That subtitle about “urban media” is a pretty cool concept.

•   Mattern begins by talking about a present-day, high-tech attempt in New York City to build new data collection zones. These so-called “smart cities” hoover up as much information about people and their habits as possible—tracking people’s physical movements, their internet usage, and tons of other metrics—allegedly so as to make urban infrastructures—plumbing, power, garbage collection, transportation, sewage, and other such systems—more efficient and more equitable.

•   In turn, residents have access to massive bucketfuls of data about their city and can therefore make better-informed choices than ever before.

•   In short, this is the kind of cutting-edge, big-data project that promises to change how cities work, turning them into giant, information & communication systems.

•   [pause]

•   Except Mattern points out that for literally thousands of years, cities have been already served similar functions—as centers for both the inputting and outputting of massive quantities of data. She writes:

•   “[QE] …For millennia, our cities have been designed to foster “broadcast”; they’ve been “wired” for transmission; they’ve hosted architectures for the production and distribution of various forms of intelligence and served as hubs for records-management; they’ve rendered themselves “readable” to humans and machines; they’ve even written their “source code,” their operating instructions, on their facades and into the urban form itself.”

•   [pause]

•   See? I told you the idea of urban media is a cool concept!

•   The cities themselves are media of communication—the streets, buildings, public spaces designed to convey information by and from people.

•   [pause]

•   And one aspect of that kind of broadcasting is being sufficiently loud—sounding sufficiently clear—to convey thoughts and ideas.

•   Which is why a place like Ancient Athens—the birthplace of democracy and which has been a major urban center for something like 2,500 years prior to the Internet—seems to have been designed for people to make speeches.

•   [pause]

•   Mattern writes, for example, about an entire field of knowledge called “archaeoacoustics” that looks at how sound traveled and resonated in ancient places.

•   For example, colosseums and other amphitheaters throughout ancient Greece   and Rome are still places where an orator’s voice travels much further and more clearly than if that individual were talking in a normal outdoor space.

•   [pause]

•   The acoustics at the ancient Greek theatre at the city of Epidaurus, for example, built in the late 300s BC or BCE, has a reputation for being so well-built that an audience member can allegedly hear a pin drop or a quiet whisper from anywhere in the 13,000-something seat stadium.

•   A news article from 2017 reports on how a group of scientists attempted to verify the acoustics of the space using sensitive microphones. And do you know what they found?

•   [pause]

•   Well, they found that some of those accounts were exaggerated. No, you can’t really recognize the sound of a pin dropping from the very extreme ends of this extremely large theatre.

•   [pause]

•   Fine, but even the party-poopingest of these scientists agreed that you could absolutely hear a seasoned actor or orator from all the way in the back.

•   And fortunately we don’t need the amphitheater to have magical physics-defying properties to make our point, or to be impressed with how well sound carries in this space. That is, even if it requires training to take full advantage of the venue’s acoustic properties, it’s still a location that enhances the volume and clarity of the human voice—no electronic loudspeaker required.

•   [pause]

•   Similarly, sound scientists, archaeologists and tour guides alike have speculated about the unusual echoing properties at the Maya pyramid of Kukulkán at Chichén Itzá in Mexico. 

•   When you clap your hands in front of the main staircase, it sounds like a bird—possibly even a quetzal bird that played a role of some importance in ancient Maya society.

•   [pause]

•   So here’s the sound of a resplendent quetzal—Pharomachrus mocinno—[Fade in quetzal sound & EQ out the wind-plosives]

•   …

•   And here’s the sound of clapping & the echoes from the pyramid of Kukulkán.

•   [A few seconds extracted from this video] 

•   [pause]

•   So exactly the same?

•   No.

•   In the ballpark?

•   Sure. Maybe.

•   [pause]

•   Though there are still debates as to whether or not those stairs deliberately and specifically reproduce a quetzal sound, or whether the acoustics meant something else, it’s a safe bet that these remarkably skilled Maya engineers understood that they were building a structure with special sound properties.

•   [pause]

•   Important buildings in the preindustrial world, then, could amplify sounds, or alter them in a wide variety of specific ways.

•   Understanding some of ways that people utilized these special acoustics often involves a good bit of conjecture, but it’s clear that playing around with sound—and learning from those experiments—held a place of prominence amongst all kinds of people of the past.

•   The fact that these folks then built permanent structures with sounds in mind—buildings that could last for centuries or even millennia—remains a testament to how important a role these sonic elements played for many historical peoples.

•   [pause]

•   And those kinds of innovations didn’t matter just to city folk either.

•   For instance, a 2022 book by a professor of English literature and folklore named William Clements examines the public speaking traditions of multiple indigenous populations of North America—most of whom were not from urban areas at all.

•   He discusses a historical account of a speech delivered by the leader named Herochshe—of the Kansa people—also known as the Kaw nation.

•   Around the year 1820, Herochshe had been on a mission of peace, attempting to end a war between the Kansa and their neighbors, of the Oto, Missouri, and Iowa nations.

•   In delivering his main oration, Herochshe utilized multiple speech techniques that seem to have greatly impressed everyone present.

•   Among many other elements was his masterful use of vocal discipline and volume control—what musicians call dynamics.

•   [pause]

•   The high-level attendees at this peace conference acknowledged Herochshe was to be the first speaker.

•   [pause]

•   The Kansa leader began his speech with a full forty-five of silence. 

•   The U.S.-born observer named Edwin James who documented the speech, reported that when Herochshe finally got ready to speak, he first calmly scanned his audience, gauging the mood.

•   [pause]

•   And then he unleashed his power as a trained and practiced orator. Writes James:

•   “[QE] He then began his address, by raising his voice at once to its full intonation, producing a truly powerful effect upon the ear, by a contrast with the deep and long continued silence which preceded it. He was at no loss for subject or for words, but proceeded right onwards to the close of his speech, like a full-flowing, bold, and impetuous stream.”

•   [pause]

•   Maybe one of the big lessons we can draw from this incident is that a great speechmaker doesn’t need anything except a consummate grasp of language, a good ear, a strong voice, the ability to accurately predict how a speech will go over with an audience.

•   Then, after mastering those elements, a great public speaker needs a lot of self-discipline.

•   Discipline to stay calm in a tense situation when war and peace are on the line.

•   And discipline to study—and practice, practice, practice—the elements of good rhetoric.

•   [pause]

•   So maybe technology is overrated.

•   That said, gifted, disciplined speakers with access to additional technological tools can pull off different kinds of oratorical feats.

•   [pause]

•   If we listen very closely, maybe we can discover what kinds of new accomplishments they were able to pull off.

•   [Separator music]

Cone-shaped megaphones

·      Up until the twentieth century, if you wanted some kind of physical tool to make your voice louder—and you didn’t have an amphitheater nearby—you really had just the one remaining option: Using some kind of cone-shaped voice loudening device.

·      [pause]

·      The first versions of what eventually became known as the megaphone are shrouded in legend.

·      For instance, Alexander the Great allegedly had his army haul around an oversized bronze horn that could reputedly allow a human voice to carry for at least a couple of miles.

·      During the middle ages—which was something like a thousand years or so after Alexander’s lifetime—a new generation of writers seem to have embellished that story, claiming that Alexander’s mega-funnel could reach the ears of soldiers who were up to sixty miles away.

·      [pause]

o   Megaphones could apparently amplify people’s imaginations as well as people’s voices.

·      [pause]

·      And these kinds of sound-cones were not only found in Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea.

·      Back in the Americas, at least one group of indigenous people also utilized a similar device.

·      A manuscript called the Codex Canadensis is one of the very rare illustrated depictions of 17thcentury Native Americans—First Peoples as these nations are known collectively in Canada.

·      The book seems to have been illustrated and captioned by a French missionary priest of the Jesuit Order named Louis Nicholas who was born in 1634 and who probably died around the early 1680s.

·      On one of these pages, an indigenous man has a mysterious looking object—maybe three feet long—and half as tall as the man’s head.

o   And, impossibly, it’s depicted free-floating in the air in front of his mouth.

·      A scrawled caption in French characterizes the illustration this way:

o   “[QE] Portrait of a famous one-eyed man. This captain had one eye put out by an arrow. He was a great warrior and was the terror of many surrounding nations. He is addressing his soldiers through a birch bark tube.”

·      The shape of this strange floating megaphone-like object looks more like a giant cigar than a cone, which might mean that it was not as effective for amplifying a voice as other kinds of megaphones.

·      Then again, Father Louis Nicholas’ illustrations are not what any sane person would call photo-realistic—not by a long shot.

·      [pause]

·      Oh, and in a later section, he includes a drawing of a unicorn which he says is in the Red Sea region—and he argues elsewhere against other Europeans who deny the existence of unicorns. So again—this important sketcher of Canadian people and wildlife is himself somewhat sketchy.

·      [pause]

·      Nevertheless, he was actually in North America. And most of his North American plant and animal drawings correspond to known species of both—so there’s every reason to believe that the birch bark tube represents his best effort to create an accurate drawing of something real.

·      At the end of the day, it’s hard to tell exactly what we’re looking at here, then, but a good best guess is that it’s a genuine depiction of some kind of large, voice-enhancing technology, akin to a megaphone.

·      [pause]

·      Fortunately, more precise drawings of cones-of-loudness eventually followed.

·      They were created during the late 17th century—a few decades after Father Nicholas’s travels.

·      They were built and rigorously documented during a broad period in Western Europe known today as the Scientific Revolution.

·      In 1671, the mathematician, inventor, man-of-letters, diplomat, spy, and all-around-smarty pants guy named Samuel Morland claimed to have used scientific principles to invent a new kind of amplification horn called the speaking trumpet.

·      In January, 1671, the scientific periodical Philosophical Transactions of London, published a short summary article about this device entitled:

o   “[QE] An Account of the Speaking Trumpet, as it hath been contrived and published by Sir Samuel Moreland[,] Knight and Baronet, together with its uses both at Sea and Land”

·      The article begins, explaining that the most effective version of the device is five foot, six inches long and “turn’d trumpet-wise”—that is, twisted around into a trumpet-shape.

o   It’s two inches in diameter at the speaking-into end and twenty-one inches at the output end.

·      The article elaborates on the principles through an ideal speaking trumpet should be constructed.

·      One of the points Morland makes is that turning the tube circularly or trumpet-wise does not, in fact, weaken the voice as predicted, but actually strengthens it. 

·      Based on that observation, the article explains Morland’s observations about acoustics in one doozy of a long run-on sentence. 

·      The short gist of his argument goes like this.

o   As the voice runs into the walls of the tube, 

o   “[QE] …an entire Cone of imaginary rays of Sound are reverberated to some Center—”

·      The same way that beams of light bounce off of reflective surfaces. He then concludes that the cone must work for sound the way that a parabolic mirror works with light, focusing and concentrating the sound. 

·      [pause]

·      So I’m not a physicist but my understanding of Morland’s argument is that he’s emphasizing the echoing of vibrations that do take place within the tube of a funnel, but not really accounting for the questions of air pressure and impedance that modern day folks with degrees in physics would tell you is key to the perceived amplification that takes place in one of these suckers.

o   If you have any expertise in this area or any thoughts, head on over to this episode’s page at findyourselfinhistory.com and leave a comment. Or send me an email—doug@findyourselfinhistory.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

·      [pause]

·      One guy who had thoughts—and who made them known just seven years after Morland published his findings—was a Mr. John Conyers of London.

o   Conyers wrote a letter to the same publication about his own experiments—using different materials and bending the tubes into different kinds of shapes—to improve the device.

o   And he said he made an even louder and clearer one, in a more compact shape—which he renamed “[QE] The reflecting trumpet.”

o   He claimed that his own design eventually carried distinctive words across London’s River Thames—against a strong wind, no less.

o   Best of all, he drew illustrations of his inventions.

o   One looks like a genie’s bottle.

o   Another looks like someone had been playing a straight trumpet while running at full speed and then collided with a brick wall causing the horn to collapse on itself like an accordion.

o   The third one appears to be enormous and mounted on a wooden stand. The whole thing has a strong Dr. Seussean-vibe to it.

o   I have posted the last of these extraordinary drawings on to findyourselfinhistory.com if you want to take a look.

·      [pause]

·      [Separator Music here?]

Sound from air flow

·      Over the next centuries, scientists seem to have learned a great deal more about acoustics and the way that sound vibrations, pressure, and energy interact with one another.

·      But despite how many bright, inventive folks experimented with sound, and proposed new theoretical models—the technology of making voices louder did not really change much between 1671 and the later years of the 19th century.

·      For instance, I’m looking at a general textbook on physics from the 1860s—nearly two centuries after Morland’s first article.

·      And sure enough, the book’s section on acoustics includes a big reference to your friend and mine, the speaking trumpet:

o   “[QE] A loud voice with a speaking-trumpet 20 feet long, can be heard at a distance of three miles.”

·      But a couple of centuries of experience with these megaphones also led the author to throw in one additional observation.

o   “[QE] No one can use the speaking-trumpet long without being exhausted, which shows that an unusual effort has to be made with the voice.”

·      [pause]

·      The implication behind this assertion was that pushing air harder through this kind of device was the only known way to amplify sound. And it remained a more-or-less accurate statement, at least until the invention of electronic amplification.

·      [pause]

·      Within that brief window, then, a number of crafty inventors figured out that they could make louder noises—using existing megaphone technology—but forcing more air through it—with one of those new-fangled electric motors.

·      [whoosh sound. Hairdryer?]

·      [pause]

·      One of the best examples of this technology came in the form of the Victor Auxetophone.

·      Its inventors were Horace Short—who lived from 1872–1917—and Sir Charles Algernon Parsons who lived from 1854 to 1931.

·      If you’ve heard of Parsons today, it’s likely for his invention of the modern steam turbine—the fan-blade-wheel-like mechanism that grabs power from steam and turns it into continuously rotating energy.

o   But as a side-hustle, he took his passion for making exciting things by moving gasses through tubes into the realm of sound amplification.

·      Horace Short, meanwhile, was from a family of aviators who eventually did a lot of engineering on airplane designs. He first patented the auxetophone and related air-flow-based amplification systems all the way back in 1898.

o   He eventually sold the patent to Parsons.

·      [pause]

·      I’m now looking at an advertisement from a 1905 publication called The American Magazine, for one of these very devices.

·      It looks like a typical early disk-playing record player with a large horn-shaped cone jutting off at an angle from the needle or stylus.

·      The difference is that the player itself rests on top of a cabinet. Inside the cabinet is a large, heavy-looking motorized pump with a tube running up into the stylus apparatus up-top.

·      The ad reads:

o   “[QE] New and remarkable invention—the pneumatic principle of the finest organs added to the Victor, amplifying its pure musical tone into a magnificent volume of melodious sound. New and ingenious form of sound-box. Electric motor and air-compressing apparatus of specially constructed type.

o   “Fills the largest hall, theatre, or church

o   “Grand opera, dance program or complete concert entertainment in one instrument.

o   “Every record that can be played upon the Victor is produced with even fuller effect on the Victor Aux-e-to-phone.

·      On some of their marketing materials, including this ad, Victor used hyphens to separate out the syllables on the word “auxetophone.”

o   “[QE]Simple to operate; strong and finely made. A beautiful piece of furniture.

o   “At principal Victor dealers on or before October 1st.

o   “Victor Talking Machine Co Camden NJ”

·      If you want to hear one of these in action, I’ve thrown up a link on findyourselfinhistory.com to a YouTube video in which you can hear one of these auxetophones doing its thing.

·      And the thing it does—is be really loud.

·      Once the air pump gets turned on, the volume becomes much, much louder—and it sounds pretty clear too.

·      But problems with these devices included—but were not limited to—the following issues:

1.    They were crazy-expensive.

2.    They were crazy-heavy.

3.    There’s an audible motor noise of the air pump and a corresponding whooshing sound like a hairdryer or vacuum cleaner.

4.    There were only two volume settings: [whisper] Too quiet–when the air pump was off—[shouting with vacuum noise in background again] and ear-bleedingly loud!—when the pump was activated!

·      [pause]

·      To be fair, as the ad says, they were designed to fill a large venue with sound. 

·      These babies are not for your living room—unless you want to make your neighbors mad—and by neighbors, I mean people who live three miles down the road.

o   Though the jerks in the dorm room next to mine in college used to play their terrible, terrible music at least that loud—and they didn’t have the excuse of not having a volume knob on their sound system.

·      [pause]

·      And it wasn’t just phonographic records that could be amplified by compressed air systems.

·      The Auxetophone was also used to amplify stringed instruments.

·      A December 1905 article in another British periodical called The Musical Times talks about a curious combination-concert-&-science-&-technology conference that took place the previous month at a meeting of the Northern Scientific Club in the English city of Newcastle.

·      It explains that the inventor Parsons himself—who was president of the club—showed off his very-loud auxetophone record player. But then he and a group of musicians also demonstrated a set of pneumatic pickup-like contraptions attached to a violin, a cello and a double-bass.

·      The article describes the devices:

o   “[QE] “In the case of stringed instruments, attachable movable arms, very finely balanced—”

·      And

o   “[QE] which offer very little inconvenience to the performer.”

·      It goes on:

o   “[QE] When the string quartet was being played, the volume of sound was equal to that produced by a large body of strings, even though the trumpet-mouths were turned away from the audience.”

o   Again—these suckers are loud.

·      This short article concludes with an insightful reflection on how scientific innovations like the auxetophone might seem at first to be only of interest to scientists. Yet, it reflects that

o   “…[QE] it would be unwise to pass by the Auxetophone as a mere toy, or as a matter of just passing interest. Do there not seem to be possibilities lying before it in regard to organ-building?”

·      [pause]

·      Wait—organ building? Oh yeah, I’d read somewhere on the tech discussion website StackExchange that a case could be made that the loudest acoustic instrument is a pipe organ.

o   [play midi pipe organ church-sounding 1-4 to 1-2 to 1-3 phrasing]

o   You know—the way air flows through those pipes is really similar to the kind of airflow-based amplification that didn’t come into existence until these electric motor driven pneumatic systems at the end of the 1890s.

o   So when were pipe organs first invented? Let’s see…

·      [book pages turning] Looking in a book…

·      [keyboard typing] and cross-referencing at www.lookingupthings.historicalstuff

·      [Get louder as going through this sentence] Oh it says here the first pipe organ was invented by Ctesibius, curator at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt—in the THIRD CENTURY BCE!?!

·      That’s like two thousand, two hundred years before the invention of the auxetophone! And it’s close to two millennia before the Samuel Morland was still working on trying to make voices louder—with a freaking funnel!

·      [Exhausted sigh] What kinds of conclusions can we draw from that crazy chronology?

·      [pause]

·      Let’s see what we can come up with…

·      [Separator music]

Conclusion

·      Actually, one of the coolest conclusions we can draw from that crazy chronology is how many amplification technologies were in flux, unsettled and seat-of-the-pants experimental for literally thousands of years.

·      To really study the past is to engage in what’s called historical imagination—to speculate what it would have been like to live at a certain point in time and space—to try to empathize with peoples from other contexts.

·      When you immerse yourself in evidence from the past like that, you find out that virtually nobody had any idea about which technologies were going to become the dominant ones and which ones would become historical curiosities.

·      One of the problems with some of the most oversimplified versions of pop history is that they abuse the vantage point of the present—that cliché about hindsight being 20-20.

·      In the process, they look at the lives of famous people from the past as people destined to become famous.

o   But during their own places & times, those folks’ lives would have felt just as uncertain as our lives are today.

·      In the same way, new scientific ideas don’t just magically turn into new technologies. A new invention doesn’t just appear out of nowhere and change everyone’s lives all at once.

·      It’s a process—one takes place in sudden stops and starts.

·      And it isn’t, as it’s sometimes portrayed, just a straight line march of progress from The Stupid People of the Past to the Clever Folks of Now.

·      On the contrary, the fact that the Ancient Library of Alexandria had a whooshing air-based amplified instrument is a testament to how utterly erratic—and downright jerky—that so-called progress can be.

·      [Theme vamp fade in]

Outro, teaser, credits

·      And speaking of jerky, we never even got to how egomaniacal dictators used amplification technologies to make themselves seem larger than life—and louder than everybody else.

·      To do that, we need to explore the age of electronic amplification which began just a couple of decades after the invention of the auxetophone—and is still the dominant way of making people and things louder to this day.

·      In some ways, access to that tech represents a true break from the past, meaning that people who use it—like you—are, in fact, weirdos.

·      We’ll take up that topic next time.

·      Stay tuned.

·      [pause]

·      You may find the references to the historical sources, sound files, and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

·      If you’ve got thoughts about this episode or about this podcast, chuck an email my way at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com .

·      Special thanks to my incomparable colleague and fellow historian Nancy Locklin-Sofer who helped me confirm the meaning of the hard-to-read French text from the Codex Canadensis.

·      She and I both work at Maryville College—Super close to the Great Smoky Mountains. Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu 

o   [Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect Maryville College, its administrators, faculty, staff, students, board of directors, or any anonymous echoes reverberating through the Anderson Hall bell tower.

·      This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

·      Thanks for listening.