Sensing noise, sensing space. Environmental perceptions and the impact on future urban spane in Germany and the United Kingdom (1900-1930), In: Christoph Schliephake/Evi Zemanek (eds.): Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories: Narratives of Coming Nature(s) from Antiquity to the Anthropocene, Lanham, MY, Lexington, 2022, 2, S. 171-190

This article focuses on the sensory experiences of listening to sound in urban spaces in early 20th century United Kingdom and Germany. It highlights how the sonification of human habitats (city quarters and neighbourhoods), located in close-range to industrial plants and workshops, affected concepts of space and its sensory components. Sound has cultural, social, technological and economical dimensions that are intertwined with legal practices. Sound becomes noise when the social and cultural meanings and interpretations of acoustic materials and auditory knowledge shift. This is an arena of social acoustics in which differences of experience have to be marked and reaffirmed; where substantiations are made by judicial interpretations or the professional practices of observing and detecting emissive nuisances (Stahl 2022, 13-15)