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In the movie Angels with Dirty Faces, the director Michael Curtiz presents audiences with a pair of contrasting depictions of the New York City soundscape. Showing the boyhood home of the future gangster Rocky Sullivan, the movie opens with a scene of a New York slum in 1923 complete with the sounds of women beating rugs over their balconies, horses' hooves, a peddler crying his wares, and a street piano playing "Sidewalks of New York." After Rocky's arrest, the film skips forward fifteen years to 1938, the same year as the film's release. We are shown the same slum, but this time the soundscape is dominated by a van playing jazz music through a set of three loudspeakers mounted on the roof.1 The director's creative use of sound helped create a sense of past and present for contemporary audience members. Today it provides us with an idea of just how thoroughly loudspeaker technology transformed the urban soundscapes of America starting in the mid-1920s.
What exactly was the purpose of the vehicle with its three loudspeakers, and how had it managed to take over New York City soundscapes? By 1924 the loudspeaker had already reshaped the American sonic environment through its use in home and storefront radio sets. In the following decade, vehicles with attached loudspeakers had begun roving the nation's streets delivering music and spoken messages, supplanting earlier forms of sonic advertising. These mobile public address systems, commonly referred to as "sound trucks" or "loudspeaker trucks," were immensely popular with politicians, religious proselytizers, and commercial advertisers. In 1938 Curtiz's viewers would have expected the catchy jazz tune to give way to a political spiel, religious oratory, or perhaps an advertisement for the latest product.
Considerable research exists on listeners' reactions to the use of home radio sets to receive commercial and political messages from network radio broadcasts, 2 but the sound truck exemplifies a significantly different application of loudspeaker technology that warrants separate examination. The monolithic and unified nature of commercial broadcast radio in the network era has been somewhat exaggerated, as Alexander Russo has shown,3 but sound trucks were under even less centralized control and were neither subject to the mores of a large conglomerate seeking to maintain the goodwill of a widespread listenership...