The Rhythm of the Rails: Sound and Locomotion
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a fascination with the concept of ‘rhythm’ in a range of disciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts, a preoccupation which would later be developed in movements such as Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Rhythmanalysis.’ The experimental psychologists of the turn of the nineteenth century explored rhythm in relation to both the auditory and the visual, and showed a particular concern with the relationship between measures which were externally imposed and endogenous rhythms. This chapter looks at the ways in which locomotion––and in particular the locomotive railway––is used as an exemplum in rhythm studies, and then explores its auditory renditions in nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and, as ‘implied sound,’ in silent film, in which the question of rhythm as auditory and/or visual becomes particularly charged.