This thesis surveys the sounds of everyday street and work life to argue for a reassessment of the way historians have understood community, space, materiality and identity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Germany and Britain. It will demonstrate that sound played an important role in the organisation of urban space and social order. Furthermore it will show how the historical subject as listener emphasises the volatility of identity, place-making and community. Sounds either defined a community through positive responses or created conflict where one group heard the sounds of another group as noise. Sound helps to define the social groups that this thesis focuses on, such as experts, intellectuals, local administrators, immigrants or factory labourers. The ephemeral nature of sound and the subjectivity of listening, however, also pull apart such neat definitions and reveal the fractures within each of these social groups. Throughout this thesis, differing reactions to everyday sounds in the conurbations of Manchester and Düsseldorf will demonstrate how communities sought to define themselves and their environments through the production and reception of sound. What emerges is a re-composition of everyday life in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century that challenges examinations of it based on images of class, sociability and culture. Düsseldorf and Manchester were substantial cities that grew during the period studied here and underwent similar processes of technological change that affected both the social order and the physical environment. This thesis demonstrates that the audibility of specific technologies, buildings and machines physically affected listeners, and that working classes, middle-class professionals and local administrators all created regimes of noise intent on controlling behaviour in streets and workplaces. One of the key tropes within studies of sound is that listening places the historical subject at the centre of their environment while seeing places them outside of it. Using this idea, this thesis will make an original contribution to a number of debates. First of all, sounds broke down visual boundaries between street and workplace and this dissertation examines how that changes historical notions of place and space. Secondly, this thesis establishes how sound exposes the lines of fracture and cohesion within and between social groups that historians of popular street culture have tried to emphasise through class relations. Thirdly, sound allows for a re-examination of the power structures in which factory labourers and immigrants worked and lived as it presents practices of listening and sound production that breathe new life into ‘histories from below’ and challenge the top-down approaches associated with governmentality. Finally, this thesis will challenge the notion of noise as unwanted sound, prevalent in the growing number of histories on urban noise by demonstrating the diversity of everyday and medical reactions to ‘noise’ and exploring the problem of ‘silence’ in negotiations of migrant and worker identity and the development of road technologies. Overall, this thesis will determine that the role of sound in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century complicates historical debates on the physical and social organisation of urban space. Different communities transformed their identities around shared listening practices and adapted their rhythms of everyday life to sounds that resonated between street and home, work and leisure.

Der Europäische Begriff vom Klang war historisch bis Beginn des 20. Jahrhundert mit der pythagoreischen Musiktheorie verknüpft. Das bedeutet, dass die Theorie harmonischer Schwingungen paradigmatisch war für die wissenschaftliche Akustik ebenso wie für die Musiktheorie. Als anscheinend einziger Theoretiker der Frühen Neuzeit hatte Francis Bacon Zweifel an diesem Ansatz angemeldet und sound-houses zur empirischen Erforschung des Klangs vorgeschlagen. Die Arbeit greift diese Spur auf und stellt sie in ihren historischen Kontext. Sie benutzt dazu eine kulturarchäologische Methode, die auch das historisch Unsichtbare berücksichtigt. Um den Begriff des nicht-pythagoreischen Klangs theoretisch zu modellieren, wird ein phänomenologischer Ansatz vorgeschlagen („Sonophänomen“), der auf der Erfahrung mit digitaler Sound/Audio-Technologie fußt. Die Arbeit rekonstruiert die Vorgeschichte der kulturellen Marginalisierung des nicht-pythagoreischen Klangs in Europa während der Antike und der Renaissance. Sie untersucht die kulturellen und biographischen Bedingungen, die es Bacon ermöglichten, aus der pythagoreischen Tradition herauszutreten, und kontrastiert seinen „verpassten Paradigmenwechsel“ mit Descartes’ erfolgreicher Transformation der Musiktheorie in die entstehende kanonische westliche Musikästhetik. Die Schlüsse, die gezogen werden, betreffen (1) die jahrhundertelange ‚kulturelle Taubheit’ gegenüber nicht-pythagoreischen Musikkulturen, (2) die Medientheorie von Musik- und Klangwerkzeugen, und (3) die linguistische Pragmatik des Begriffs „Klang/Sound“. / The European concept of sound was historically linked to Pythagorean music theory until the beginning of the 20th century. That means that the theory of harmonic vibrations was paradigmatic for scientific acoustics as well as for music theory. The seemingly only theorist of the early modern age being skeptical about this approach was Francis Bacon, who had envisioned sound-houses for a new kind of empirical sound research. The thesis focuses on this trace and puts it into historical context since antiquity. Its method is a cultural archeology that considers also the historically invisible. To make non-Pythagorean sound theoretically accessible, a phenomenological approach is used (‚sonophenomenon’) which is rooted in the experience of digital sound/audio technology. The thesis reconstructs the prehistory of the cultural marginalization of non-Pythagorean sound in Europe during Antiquity and Renaissance. It investigates the cultural and biographic conditions that enabled Bacon to leap Pythagorean tradition and contrasts hismissed paradigmatic change’ to Descartes’ successful transformation of music theory into the upcoming canonical Western aesthetics of music. The results being drawn concern (1) the 'cultural deafness' that prevented the acknowledgment of non-Pythagorean musical cultures for centuries, (2) the media theory of sound and musical instruments, and (3) the linguistic pragmatics of the concept of sound.