Environmental awareness

Environmental awareness has also been around for a long time too. I saw a reprint of a letter from The Times, 7 August 1933, in the Acoustics Bulletin (Jul/Aug 2009 edition). I remember reading a few letters in the Today paper complaining about the noise from the SMRT trains in Singapore after they increased the train frequency. One of the readers even complained about one of the letters saying that he actually enjoys listening to the noise of the train!! Must be a train fanatic :-) Anyway, the letter to The Times reads:

"Damnable" inventions other than steam are being applied to ships. The Times has often voiced complaints against street noises - the organ-grinder has long been regarded as a public nuisance and even the street band: both are now rare, if not extinct. Unfortunately, the organ-grinder is reappearing on ship board, in the far less tolerable form of the raucous, very loud-speaker gramophone and wireless so called "music". All my life I have been a traveller on the Thames. I went recently to Ramesgate and back. A more perfect day for the water could not have been, but in gooing to sea we seek peac and content, the enjoyment of clean air, and getting away from the town. Instead of which, except during rare intervals, we were brayed at from every angle by a horrible noise-producing mechanism which only occasionally simulated music; on deck our ears were everywhere offended by the noise; the saloon was a veritable pandemonium, worse than the streets of Rome. Quiet talk with a neighbour, even reading, was impossible; proper enjoyment of the charms of river and sea was ruled out. On these trips the beauty of the side waves and of the ship's wake is enough to fill the eye wit joy; the throb of the engines, the beat of the paddles, is a sufficient and the only appropriate music.

Just in case you're wondering, the organ-grinder is that hand-cranked music machine you see in the silent movies :-)