David Francis wrote:
You could imagine a certain gentility and politeness in the
Yes - it's impossible for anyone brought up today to have any idea how people even 200 years ago 'heard' the world round them. I guess we get some impression by getting into mountains, etc, but even then a road 20 miles away can create a ground level of noise.Edinburgh Assembly Rooms, but you would expect other gatherings to be a bit more vigorous and boisterous. Were gatherings smaller? Did fewer people dance at a time? Were the bands bigger (I'm thinking about the pre-accordion era)? Did musicians play louder? Any thoughts?
Apart from rivers, the sea or the wind the background noise of 18th c Scots city life must have very cacophonous and not the sort of level drone of traffic, computer fans, central heating pumps and stuff we have taking up the first few decibels of our ear sensitivity. People talking, hooves and iron rimmed wheels on cobbles, dogs barking, artisans working with tools etc. And all that against a background of genuine silence - and in the country, just real silence with every shepherd's pipe or ploughman's call heard from miles away.
I would guess they were more finely tuned to distinguish music from the noise of life, because they were not used to hearing it all the time and hearing it loudly, which we are. Many of the favoured domestic instruments of the time were pretty quiet, even the pianos when they first arrived were very gentle beasts by modern standards, and fiddles are supposed to have been softer in tone before the 'redesign' lifted the bridge and raked the neck with higher string tension. Guitar family instruments were much quieter too.
Maybe people did speak more gently and take more care not to be noisy. My grandfather was still a Victorian in spirit and his house was always very quiet, raised voices and we would be told to stop shouting, radio on a very low volume. And Victorians lived in a noisy industrial age, he worked in shipyards and I'm sure they were not quiet at all.
I seem to remember seeing, somewhere, an Victorian engraving of a singer performing with a kind of horn like a gramophone horn or the bell of large wind instrument. It might have been a cariacature lampooing the huge orchestral brass instruments which were being invented.
David
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