Emily Thompson

Bio: Emily Thompson is an academic researcher from Max Planck Society. The author has contributed to research in topics: Sound (geography) & Architectural acoustics. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 8 publications receiving 512 citations.

The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933

Abstract: The American soundscape changed dramatically during the early decades of the twentieth century as new acoustical developments transformed both what people heard and the ways that they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston’s Symphony Hall, New York’s office skyscrapers, and the sound stages of Hollywood. The result was that the many different spaces that constituted modern America began to sound alike—clear, direct, efficient, and non‐reverberant. While this new modern sound said little about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it has much to tell us about the culture that created it. This talk will explore the history of modern sound and modern culture in early twentieth‐century America.

The soundscape of modernity: Architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in America, 1900–1933

Abstract: The American soundscape changed dramatically during the early decades of the twentieth century as new acoustical developments transformed both what people heard and the ways that they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston’s Symphony Hall, New York’s office skyscrapers, and the sound stages of Hollywood. The result was that the many different spaces that constituted modern America began to sound alike—clear, direct, efficient, and non‐reverberant. While this new modern sound said little about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it has much to tell us about the culture that created it. This talk will explore the history of modern sound and modern culture in early twentieth‐century America.

The architecture of science

Abstract: How do the spaces in which science is done shape the identity of the scientist and the self-conception of scientific fields? How do the sciences structure the identity of the architect and the practice of architecture in a specific period? And how does the design of spaces such as laboratories, hospitals, and museums affect how the public perceives and interacts with the world of science? The Architecture of Science offers a dazzling set of speculations on these issues by historians of science, architecture, and art; architectural theorists; and sociologists as well as practicing scientists and architects The essays are organized into six sections: "Of Secrecy and Openness: Science and Architecture in Early Modern Europe"; "Displaying and Concealing Technics in the Nineteenth Century"; "Modern Space"; "Is Architecture Science?"; "Princeton after Modernism: The Lewis Thomas Laboratory for Molecular Biology"; and "Centers, Cities, and Colliders"

Dead Rooms and Live Wires: Harvard, Hollywood, and the Deconstruction of Architectural Acoustics, 1900-1930

Abstract: In 1900 Wallace Sabine, a physicist at Harvard University, published a mathematical formula for calculating the reverberation time in a room, a measure of how quickly or slowly sound energy dies away in an enclosed space. In 1930 Carl Eyring, a physicist working in the Sound Motion Picture Studio at Bell Telephone Laboratories, revised Sabine's equation. This essay examines material changes in the practice of architectural acoustics in order to explain how and why Eyring was motivated to reformulate the Sabine equation. Sabine's equation was the product of experimentation in highly reverberant rooms. Eyring worked in a world increasingly constructed of sound-absorbing building materials--a world of acoustically "dead" rooms in which Sabine's original assumptions were no longer valid. Further, Eyring's world was filled with electroacoustic devices that had not existed in 1900. "Live" wires powered new tools for producing, measuring, and controlling sound, and the new electroacoustic technologies additional...

A Space for Place in Sociology

Abstract: Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a “sociology of place,” for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social movements, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?

Tools of the trade: the socio-technology of arbitrage in a Wall Street trading room

Abstract: To analyze the organization of trading in the era of quantitative finance we conduct an ethnography of arbitrage, the trading strategy that best exemplifies finance in the wake of the quantitative revolution. In contrast to value and momentum investing, we argue, arbitrage involves an art of association—the construction of comparability across different assets. In place of essential or relational characteristics, the peculiar valuation that takes place in arbitrage is based on an operation that makes something the measure of something else—associating securities to each other. The process of recognizing opportunities and the practices of making novel associations are shaped by the specific socio-spatial and socio-technical configurations of the trading room. Calculation is distributed across persons and instruments as the trading room organizes interaction among diverse principles of valuation.

Time for space: A narrative review of research on organizational spaces

Abstract: This paper presents an integrated framework for studying organizational spaces. It suggests that existing research can be classed into three categories: studies of space as distance; studies of space as the materialization of power relations; and studies of space as experience. These approaches are drawn together using Henri Lefebvre's theory of spatial production to argue that an adequate understanding of organizational spaces would investigate how they are practised, planned and imagined. Moreover, an adequate theory of space would account for multiple spatial levels, or scales. To illustrate the potential of the synthetic framework, a reading of three exemplary studies of multiple organizational spaces, from social anthropology and economic geography, is presented. The paper concludes by presenting a research agenda that indicates how data collection and analysis in established fields such as employee relations and international business might become more 'space sensitive' by integrating such theorized cross-scale analysis.

Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification

Abstract: This paper argues that a shift is taking place in the fabric of capitalism as a result of a change in how the business of invention is understood. Using theoretical approaches that rely on the notion that capitalism increasingly tries to draw in the whole intellect, in the first part of the paper I argue that the new understanding of innovation currently shows up as three associated developments: as the mobilization of forethought, as the deepening of the lure of the commodity through the co-creation of commodities with consumers, and as the construction of different kinds of apparently more innovative space suffused with information technology. The second part of the paper then argues that these disclosures are leading to new forms of value, based on generating moments of rightness. There is a brief conclusion.