Supported by a CEHS travel and research grant, I conducted archival research in Germany for my dissertation, “Navigating ‘Bad’ Sound: Global Knowledge and Experiences of Noise across Germany and Japan around 1900.” Namely, in July 2025, I visited the Landesarchiv Berlin, the Staatsarchiv Hamburg, and the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg for three weeks. The main purpose of this trip was to collect archival documents that shed light on how the German public reacted to daily noises arising from industrialization and urbanization and how they developed everyday frameworks for understanding these noises between 1870 and 1930.

My archival work in Berlin, Hamburg, and Ludwigsburg resulted in three significant findings. First, I was able to identify the major sources of noise in Germany around 1900. Amid rapid industrialization and urbanization at that time, trains, machines used in factories, and automobiles emerged as the primary sources of noise. Second, analyzing archival materials allowed me to see how the public developed strategies to cope with the noise around them. For example, residents submitted formal complaints with their names and addresses to local authorities (see image above). Various offices, including the police, city administrations, and medical councils intervened in the complaints and communicated with the residents to solve the problems caused by noise. Third, the documents reveal diverse motivations behind public opposition to noise. For example, people sought to eliminate undesirable sounds around them because they were concerned about property devaluation, feared negative impacts on their health, or were simply unable to sleep or work. In short, their underlying concern was to maintain normalcy in daily life.