In this rich study of noise in American film-going culture, Meredith C. Ward shows how aurality can reveal important fissures in American motion picture history, enabling certain types of listening cultures to form across time. Connecting this history of noise in the cinema to a greater sonic culture, Static in the System shows how cinema sound was networked into a broader constellation of factors that affected social power, gender, sexuality, class, the built environment, and industry, and how these factors in turn came to fruition in cinema's soundscape. Focusing on theories of power as they manifest in noise, the history of noise in electro-acoustics with the coming of film sound, architectural acoustics as they were manipulated in cinema theaters, and the role of the urban environment in affecting mobile listening and the avoidance of noise, Ward analyzes the powerful relationship between aural cultural history and cinema's sound theory, proving that noise can become a powerful historiographic tool for the film historian.

About the Author

Meredith C. Ward is Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. She is also affiliated faculty for the Center for Advanced Media Studies at Johns Hopkins. She is the author of articles on sound and media for Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film; Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; and the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening and the recipient of the 2016 Dissertation Award for outstanding contribution to the field of media studies from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Noise and the Concept of
the Cinema Soundscape
1. Songs of the Sonic Body: Noise and the Sounds of
Early Motion Picture Audiences
2. The Film Industry Lays the Golden Egg: Noise,
Electro-Acoustics, and the Academy’s Adjustment
to Film Sound
3. “Machines for Listening”: Cinema Auditoriums as
Vehicles for Aural Absorption
4. Cinema Theaters as Antiquated as “Edison and His
Wax Cylinders”: Mobile Technologies and
the Negotiation of Public Noise

Conclusion: Noises We Will Be Hearing Soon

Appendix
Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"Ward’s book is one of the first in a generation to give us a new place to start when it comes to cinema sound – not by discarding the research of the past, but by resituating it in new conversations."
— Journal of Sonic Studies

"Static in the System will provide many scholars in both Film Studies and Sound Studies fresh understandings for the many convergences between cinema culture and historical concepts of noise."
— Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

"By listening to noise, Meredith Ward deftly weaves a story about the history of American film sound that takes readers on a journey from a nineteenth-century Chicago symphony hall to the twenty-first-century streets of Baltimore in order to demonstrate the importance of the body in the construction of listening. Ward relies on extensive historical research to craft an argument that privileges space over text, audience agency over technological determination to show that sonic culture is a contested terrain that might not always align with the model envisioned by producers of these spaces and the films screened within them. Static in the System is an essential book for film historians and sound scholars."—Jennifer Fleeger, author of Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz

"Ward offers a deep and compelling account of the importance of attempts to control 'noise' in its myriad forms to the history of American film."—James Lastra, author of Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity

"In Static in the System, Meredith Ward expands the sonic range of film history, mobilizing impressive and original research to show how discourses about noise have played a key role at pivotal historical moments, and lending a keen ear to cinema sound as it fades into architectural acoustics, the urban soundscape, sound art, and mobile audio."—Jacob Smith editor of Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship

Awards

Marshall McLuhan Award 2020 Finalist 2020, Media Ecology Association

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards