This talk emerged out of work editing The Years (1937) for the Cambridge Editionof Virginia Woolf (general editors, Jane Goldman and Susan Sellers), an awareness of its noisy acoustic environment, and a desire to hear as well as read the text. The inaugural moment of The Years, a talk on “Music and Literature” with the composer Ethel Smyth, set the course for a novel which is full of specific musical allusions, as well as more general descriptions of sound, from birdsong to traffic noise. The Years is full of new sound technologies (the telephone, the gramophone) as well as the new sounds of technology. In the plenary, I played sound clips and set out the historical contexts for some of TheYears’ musical allusions (e.g “After the Ball,” Wagner's Siegfried, Robbie Burns’ “It was a’ for our Rightfu’ King”) in order to argue that Woolf's concern was the regulation and definition of domestic, urban, and national space by sound, whether defined as noise or music. All of her choices speak, in various ways, to the construction of national identity through sound as well as space. As a predominantly urban novel, too, she depicts a city geography laid out through aural markers; the city read as much through sound as sight. London's streets are full of noises, from hawkers crying their wares, to trombone players and street singers. More specifically, I focused on the figure of the barrel organ player, which recurs through the novel. I traced this back to her early essay “Street Music” (1905) which was a response to the anti-street music campaigns of the 1860s. Victorian intellectuals, including Charles Babbage, Thomas Carlyle and Tennyson, sought the tighter regulation of itinerant street musicians in an attempt to preserve the sanctity of the “brain worker,” the upper middle class professional working from home. The scapegoat, however, quickly became the Italian barrel organ player, the Savoyard. In her essay, Woolf picks up on this aspect of the campaigns, depicting instead a utopian vision of a deregulated city, and defending the itinerant musician, a “pagan prophet” against the xenophobic attacks.