How Does Professor Find Success? Listen Carefully

Most of us probably think of the acoustical tile as a humble artifact from Home Depot. But not so Emily Thompson.

To the UC San Diego history professor, it is an icon of modern civilization, belonging on a pedestal along with Cubist art, Einsteinian physics and James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Introduced just before World War I, the sound-absorbing tile represents humanity’s new ability to manipulate the built environment and avoid the sonic assaults of other modern inventions, Thompson says. Like advances in painting, physics and literature, it “challenges the traditional bounds of space and time.”

Unorthodox views like that have earned Thompson prestigious and lucrative bragging rights in a growing field -- the history of sound -- that was barely heard of not long ago.

After an unusual and sometimes painful early career, Thompson last fall won a $500,000 MacArthur fellowship, one of the so-called genius awards that propel their often previously obscure recipients into a kind of intellectual and financial heaven. More recently, she also received a $25,000 grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to write a book on the switch from silent films to ones with sound.

Thompson expects to move to Los Angeles this summer to work on the book full time for a year, scouring cinema libraries and studio archives. Then she will move to New Jersey to join Princeton University’s history department, a professorship offer she accepted this month. The 44-year-old former engineer is a scholar of aural (as opposed to oral) history and seeks to understand how the ways we produce and hear sound influence culture -- and vice versa.

With much of modern history told through the sense of vision, sound has been relegated to be “a somewhat less rational sense,” Thompson said.

But to understand “how people in the past understood their own world, obviously all five senses are involved,” Thompson said.

She attempts to explore not only what people heard but also how they perceived it: “We aren’t able to listen with the same kind of ears that people in 1900 or 1930 did,” Thompson said. “Even if a time machine took me back to 1913, I would still be the product of a different time and culture.... That’s every historian’s challenge: how to escape their own mind-set to adapt to the time they are studying.”

Her 2002 book, “The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933,” won admiring reviews and several prizes for showing how concert halls, churches and movie palaces used new technology to create modern “sonic environments.” The work also delved into early anti-noise campaigns. Thompson’s second book, tentatively titled “Sound Effects,” will examine how sound transformed the movie industry and, ultimately, American society. That change has been well-documented in the world of actors, directors and writers. Remember the trauma of the screechy actress in the film musical “Singin’ in the Rain”?

Thompson focuses on behind-the-scene folks: projectionists forced to keep up with new inventions, sound-effects men creating a new profession and theater musicians driven by “talkies” into unemployment and, in a few cases, suicide -- such as the jobless New York violinist who wrote he was “tired of fighting against fate” and wrapped his mouth around a gas pipe in 1929.

Since most of the people in her story are long dead, she has been reading oral histories and poking through archives at the academy, UCLA, USC and the American Film Institute, as well as collections in New York. At the academy’s Margaret Herrick Library recently, Thompson thumbed through 1928 issues of the Motion Picture Projectionist, with an editorial announcing: “It looks as though talking pictures will play a big part for the next several seasons.”

The calendar in her UC San Diego office is marked with odd hours in the middle of the night -- reminders to set her video recorder to tape movies. Thompson has captured a couple of hundred old flicks on tape and searches for others produced between 1926 and 1931. A favorite talkie is “Applause,” a 1929 backstage weepie admired for the way director Rouben Mamoulian escaped the static photography and the limitations that had forced actors to hover near cumbersome microphones. When she watches “Applause,” Thompson looks for evidence that Mamoulian may have tucked a microphone under a pillow.

Thompson was one of two grant winners for the Academy Film Scholars program for 2005; a distinguishing element of her work, said Greg Beal, program director, is that she approaches it “as a scientist first and a film person second.”

Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program in Chicago, said his organization does not reveal how winners are chosen. But, he said, Thompson “approaches and brings ideas to the table that others don’t. She is quintessentially a MacArthur in that respect.”

At UC San Diego, she recently taught a course titled “In the Groove: A Cultural History of the Phonograph,” which took students of the iPod generation from Thomas Edison to hip-hop disc jockey Grandmaster Flash.

She described how some silent-era projectionists became, in effect, disc jockeys in theaters that couldn’t afford or got rid of live musicians. Those projectionists chose playlists (some studios later suggested scores) and spun them on dual turntables.

Thompson lugged to class the green G.E. record player her parents gave her in the 1970s. It can play 78s, 33s and 45s -- though she had to explain to some students what those terms meant.

The middle of three daughters, Thompson grew up in suburban Pittsburgh, earned a physics degree at Rochester Institute of Technology and worked as an engineer with Bell Laboratories.

She began to feel trapped until she stumbled onto a journal about the history of science. She decided to pursue it and completed a doctoral program at Princeton.

She then bounced around academia. She taught for six years at the University of Pennsylvania but was denied tenure just before her book was published. Thompson began to support herself with savings and fellowships. She considered becoming a paralegal. Or a bartender. After two years of unemployment in Boston, Thompson was hired as an associate professor at UC San Diego in 2005.

The MacArthur came soon after and elicited a congratulatory letter from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The academy grant landed her next to academy President Sid Ganis at a Polo Lounge luncheon. “I’m still waiting for George Clooney to ask me for a date,” quipped Thompson, who is single.

Princeton began wooing Thompson months ago. She said accepting the offer was a difficult decision, but that the private Ivy League campus has more money for research than UC. She also will be closer to family.

Princeton will pay her salary next year while she does research in Los Angeles without having to teach. The chance to work full time on the book in the city where movie history was made is a “perfect Hollywood ending,” she said.

Daniel Vickers, chairman of UC San Diego’s history department, said he laments Thompson’s departure, and not only for the loss of her scholarship and collegiality. “Yet another first-rate scholar employed by a public university is picked off by a rich private university,” said Vickers, a Canadian who is moving to the public University of British Columbia for what he said are personal reasons.

Meanwhile, the MacArthur grant -- $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached -- has not prompted a spending spree, although Thompson purchased books she long coveted, such as copies of Film Daily Yearbook from the ‘20s and ‘30s.

And Thompson, who now lives in a small apartment near the San Diego campus, said she hopes to rent a bungalow in Venice or Santa Monica for a year and then break into Princeton’s pricey real estate market. Though she said she does enjoy some city sounds, she is weary of decades of dorm and apartment life and noise from neighbors. The sound historian, it seems, could use a little quiet.