Acoustic Communities in late-19th Century mills and mines

or what I learned about the importance of sound & listening when building community while convincing historians to think about sonic histories.

Audible history is often about hinting at the possibility of the impact of sound on issues surrounding class and gender or on the imagination of nations and smaller communities. Less is written about how exactly sound affects, something that is partially to do with the ephemeral quality of sound. The power of sound is instead analysed through the listener, talking about how sound is experienced in a variety of settings by different actors. Some of the most informed work on listeners has been done by Mark Smith whose work on nineteenth-century America demonstrates ‘how individuals experienced, understood, made sense of, and invented their environments and themselves in ways beyond mere seeing.’[1] By placing the human actor centrally, historians have been able to open up new ways of understanding how identities and relationships are constructed and negotiated. Like Smith, who has also written about time-discipline, I am inspired by the social history of E.P. Thompson who asked ‘but what of the internalization of [work-] discipline?’[2] Implying that power structures were not merely a top down affair. I am also inspired by the Alltagsgeschichte of Alf Lüdtke who worked with the concept of Eigensinn, which means self-will or sense-of-self. Lüdtke defined Eigensinn as ‘the attempt to create some welcome respite, at least for a few brief minutes, from unreasonable external (and shop floor) demands and pressures.’[3] It is the ideas and concepts of these strands of history that allow the listener to be drawn in to the moments where power, class, gender, politics etc. were negotiated. The factory discipline of Thompson was based on sound as much as it was on sight and Lüdtke’s Eigensinn, came about in often auditory actions.

Exploring the listener is not the same as understanding the role sound itself played in the negotiations of identity, power, and so on. The listener is necessary to understand the impact of sound on human experience, but here, I want to make the case that the acoustic context in which sounds were generated and perceived is equally important. Considering the role of acoustics brings sound itself centre stage and demonstrates that, in the workplaces explored by Thompson and Lüdtke, community was created and maintained through sound. Here, Eigensinn is used to demonstrate how the soundscape of the workplace made possible the micro-political negotiations of power and identity by the worker that is implicated in that concept. Thinking about workplace communities in the late-nineteenth century through the acoustic context of these sites ‘makes us re-think [the] relationship to power’ of the workers.[4] This paper demonstrates that the natural reactions of people to their sonic environment helped Eigensinn to be established.

By sound itself I mean those audible objects to which we can ascribe acoustic properties. To understand the difference between these audible objects and the spatially and temporally defined soundscape in which they were heard historians can draw on Albert Bregman’s ‘auditory stream analysis.’ According to Bregman, who studied audition – our faculty of hearing – for decades, ‘the word “stream” [stands] for a perceptual representation, and the phrase “acoustic event” or the word “sound” for the physical cause.’[5] A ‘stream,’ then, is an event in which multiple happenings occur, whereas a sound is a singular object which can be defined through its volume, pitch and so on. In any workplace there are multiple sounds that together make up the auditory stream from which the ears have to make sense. Barry Truax, the famous scholar of sound, has, quite successfully, claimed that ‘Sound signals are the most striking components of the acoustic community, and often such sounds are unique and of historical importance.’[6] What I will do here is to discuss what I argue are the most important sound signals with the auditory stream of the mine shaft and in the card room in the weaving factory.

The sound signals dominated the actions of the workers. This did not mean that these sounds were not internalised and adapted to, thus creating an acoustic community that made work more bearable and where there was a place for Eigensinn. When historians pay attention to the sounds within the sonic environments of the people whose experiences they want to contextualise they need to think about acoustics. Here, this will be done by using the acoustic properties of mines and factories in the Ruhrgebiet and Manchester. The acoustic context together with recorded sounds of workplace machinery demonstrate what the auditory stream was from which workers made sense. It was from that point that workers could start to perform micro-political acts of Eigensinn.

In the card room of Swindells’ Mill in Bollington in the south of Manchester (fig. 1) the carding engines were placed in the shed, on the right, separated from the other machines, mostly roving frames, by a partition.

While a single sound will be discussed, that of one carding engine, the plans of card rooms show that this sound was not heard in isolation. Too often, historians tend to neglect the cacophony in which sounds were heard. Using auditory stream analysis not only helps to understand how historical subjects made sense of their soundscape, but is also method to make the historian aware of this. The sound of a carding engine consisted of the hum of the leather driving strap and the rhythm of the carding rollers.

Listening to the recording from the North West Sound Archive, the repetitive motion of the machine is immediately audible. The metallic sound that is heard throughout the recording – and which gives it an almost musical base falling on the two and the four of a 4/4 beat – is probably the shoes, which held the roller and clearer pedestals, slotting into the flanges, thus cleaning and disentangling the cotton.[7] It is this sound which gave the carding engine its most clearly defined rhythm. The other sounds were less clearly defined and therefore probably groupings of different processes within the machine. Understanding the qualities of the sound of the carding engine like this helps to understand what the mill worker was hearing. That, in turn, builds on historians’ understanding of mill workers’ experiences, which has often not taken the sensual experience into consideration. The auditory stream was filled with many different sounds, originating from different sources and locations. Working with the carding engines meant that workers had to be able to distinguish between the machines they attended and the ones they did not. The metallic sound, because it is so distinctive in the recording, may have been an important factor in making sense of the auditory stream within the card room. It has the acoustic qualities to be a sound signal. Picking up the metallic sound, a worker could let the rest of the sounds in the card room disappear into the background.

When thinking about sound and rhythm, especially in a closed space such as the card room, historians need to also be aware of acoustics. The rhythm of the carding engines and roving machines and the way they sounded within the card room was also dependent on the space’s acoustics. In most mills the card room was located in a large space on the ground floor.[8] The plans for New Bengal Mill in Manchester (fig. 2 & 3) show that the floors were covered in wood boards and the ceilings were made of concrete and that the windows comprised the largest part of the outer walls,. Because concrete has a very low absorption coefficient (table 1), meaning that it reflects nearly all of the sound waves that hit it, the floor and ceiling of the card room present surfaces that keep the sounds within the space itself. Glass has a much higher coefficient, meaning that more sound waves are being let through. The lower frequency ranges especially find their way through glass, while the higher ranges reflect off it.

Within the card room of a late-nineteenth century mill the carding engines mostly sent out lower frequency sound waves. The higher frequency metallic sound of the carding engine thus had another feature that made it stand out as it was a sound that reflected back into the room. Due to the close proximity of the reflecting surfaces the sound came back almost as soon as it was heard emanating from the machine. Only near the windows was there some loss of the volume that the machines created within the card room.

A similar analysis can be made for the mines in the Ruhrgebiet. Inside a mine, the enclosed space meant that sound reflected back from each direction without being able to escape into the air. Within coal mines, the absorption coefficient of the wall and floor areas have recently been determined to be the opposite of those of the glass windows in the cotton mill.

High-pitched sounds were absorbed more than low-pitched ones. While the sounds were trapped within the shaft, the walls of the shaft did absorb some of the sound, meaning that the sonic environment gave the miners some relief from the sounds that filled the auditory stream around them. The sound of the Signalglocke, a bell which regulated the lifts bringing miners up and down, sounded like this:

The lower pitch of the Signalglocke meant that its sounds did not get absorbed so easily and travelled far into the shafts, making it an important sound signal for the miners as they could not have visual contact and thus had to rely on auditory signals. They knew what the lift was doing through these signs and at each lift entrance there were signs called Schlagtafeln (fig. 4) that informed the miners of what the signals meant. When this communication went wrong, it could cost lives as this report in the Dortmunder Zeitung tells us. ‘After the given signals the operator believed that there were no people in the lift, while five workers were about to ride up. They went down to the bottom at full power and sustained significant injuries.’[9] Going down or up, there would have been a quietness in the lift, while when the signal was giving that it was stopped, the usual banter between the miners would be heard again.

For the mill workers and miners to have made sense of the auditory stream of their workplace, required them to be attuned to specific sound signals such as the metallic sound of the carding engine or the bell striking of the Signalglocke. Understanding the soundscape of the card room and the mineshaft like this, supports Mark Smith’s notion that for industrial workers ‘the sounds of the shop floor were deemed just that: sound, at worst noise that was necessary, but rarely simple, intolerable noise.’[10] Workers had to find a way to deal with the sounds in their work environment and acoustic qualities of the machines they worked with allowed them to do this, creating an acoustic community.

Conclusion

Bregman’s analysis revolves around creating a structure from the auditory input that people receive from the world around them. I have argued that this can help historians to understand how workers made sense of their environments through sound. So, going back to Truax and the acoustic community model: this has as its purpose ‘to define the environmental characteristics that promote effective communication within any environment under study?’[11] I hope you can agree with me, that by taking into account the acoustic context of the workplace, I have shown how workers used sound to allow for communication and thus created an acoustic community. Because workers adapted to the sounds of their workplace environment they were able to construct a shared identity based around Eigensinn. Through making sense of the auditory streams around them, workers enabled time and place for micro-political acts such as horseplay, banter and other social interactions which time-discipline aimed to prevent.

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[1] Mark M. Smith, ‘Making Sense of Social History’ Journal of Social History 37 (2003), 165-186 (167).

[2] E.P. Thompson, ’Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ Past & Present 38 (1967), 56-97 (86-87); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1965); Mark Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997).

[3] Alf Lüdtke, ‘Polymorphous Synchrony: German Industrial Workers and the Politics of Everyday Life’ International Review of Social History 38 (1993), 39-84 (52). Alf Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg, 1993); Alf Lüdtke, ‘Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay: Eigensinn and Politics among Factory Workers in Germany circa 1900’ in Michael Hanagan & Charles Stephenson (eds.) Confrontation, Class Consciousness and the Labor Process (London, 1986), 65-95.

[4] Michael Bull & Les Back, ‘Introduction: Into Sound’ Bull & Back (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford, 2003), 1-18 (4).

[5] Albert Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organisation of Sound (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 10.

[6] Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication 2^nd ed. (London, 2001), 67.

[7] For more on the working process of the carding engine see: Evan Leigh, The Science of Modern Cotton Spinning (Manchester, 1873), 102-04; James Innes, The Cotton Spinner’s Pocket Book (Manchester, 1925), 25-33; William Murphy, The Textile Industries Vol. 2 (Manchester, 1910), 43-88.

[8] Williams, Cotton Mills, 112 describes how it was the exception to the rule to have the card room on the upper floor.

[9] Dortmunder Zeitung, 30 January, 1878.

[10] Smith, ‘The Garden in the Machine : Listening to Early American Industrialisation’ in Trevor Pinch & Karin Bijsterveld, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford, 2012), 39-57 (41).

[11] Truax, Acoustic Communication, 70.