This chapter takes its title from an essay written by the American anti-noise campaigner Julia Barnett Rice, in which she complains that ‘the “hum” of industry has now made way for the shriek of industry, and it is perhaps well to call attention here to the fact that noise is not an essential part of progress’.1 Although written in 1907, this is something of a late entry in a much longer and well-documented urban battle against irruptive noise, but the terms differ here.2 For one, Rice does not object to a class of sound but rather to a narrow subset.