Histories of urban sound have often fixated on the regulation of soundscapes and sensitivities to noise – frequently on the part of a perpetually rising bourgeoisie. Using the case study of the ’news-horn’, a tubular instrument used by newspaper vendors, this chapter offers an alternative way of understanding the changing soundscapes of towns and cities: rhythm. Developing from the post-horn which had been used in England since the sixteenth century, the news-horn became a common sound on the streets of 1770s London. However, with the growth of newspaper print and news from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the intensity and frequency of the news-horns’ blasts increased. This produced an arrythmia in London’s soundscape that clashed with other street sounds, sabbath-day silence, and the busy hum of London’s commercial centres. During the 1820s this resulted in the disappearance of the news-horn from London’s streets. Looking back from the mid-nineteenth century, many writers did not celebrate the news-horn’s removal. Instead, they remembered its sound with a fond nostalgia. The news-horn was one among many casualties in the emergence of a new London soundscape that replaced a pointillist pattern of auditory information with a roaring blanket of urban noise.