Foreword: Noise and Sound in the Eighteenth Century

The relation between noise and sound in the long eighteenth century is not one which has been much studied up to now. One obvious reason is that there are no sound archives for that period. Only musical scores provide an accurate record of sounds heard then. Further, what we would nowadays characterise as a noise rather than a sound might have been perceived differently two or three centuries ago. Indeed, the idea of noise is a cultural construct ; the definition of a noise may vary over long...