MOST days it started around 9 or 10 am, and carried on until early evening. Usually it was Chopin, played ad nauseam by the piano student next door. The playing wasn’t bad, just incessant – for nearly two years.
After an experience like that, it didn’t surprise me to learn in Mike Goldsmith’s spectacularly good book that the word noise is derived from “nausea”. But Discord is far from a morose dirge about one of today’s major blights. It is full of rich anecdotes, scrupulously researched historical narrative and lucid descriptions of the sometimes bewildering science of sound.
Goldsmith shows that…
