{"id":8384,"date":"2024-08-08T17:27:59","date_gmt":"2024-08-08T21:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/margaret-watts-hughess-wondrous-victorian-sound-visualizations-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-08-08T17:27:59","modified_gmt":"2024-08-08T21:27:59","slug":"margaret-watts-hughess-wondrous-victorian-sound-visualizations-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/margaret-watts-hughess-wondrous-victorian-sound-visualizations-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Watts Hughes\u2019s Wondrous Victorian Sound Visualizations \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cI hear bravuras of birds\u2026 I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,\u201d Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the \u201cpuzzle of puzzles\u201d we call Being<\/a>. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous, that of the cold silence of spacetime voice emerged, in all its warm loveliness \u2014 this vibrating interaction of energy and matter, this oscillating displacement of particles, that can give rise to a mother\u2019s lullaby and the nightingale\u2019s song and Nina Simone, that can praise and blame and slay with silence. To me, voice is an unequaled portal to the soul and the supreme pheromone. When I miss someone, it is their voice I miss the most. <\/p>\n

For eons, we could capture the likeness of a person far in space or time, but not their voice: all the portraits of kings and queens staring down from palace walls, all the marble thinkers and the nudes descending staircases, all the photographs of lovers and children, all the mute millennia of them. Voice was life incarnate, impossible to immortalize. Then we harnessed electricity, dreamt up the phonograph and the telephone, began translating these ephemeral oscillations through the air into electrical waveforms to be transmitted and recorded. You could suddenly hear the nightingale across the globe<\/a>, you could hear the voice of the dead<\/a>. <\/p>\n

And then voice became something you could see.<\/p>\n

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Margaret Watts Hughes. (Portrait by S. Harris courtesy of Merthyr Tydfil Leisure Trust)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Margaret Watts Hughes<\/strong> (February 12, 1842\u2013October 29, 1907) was already one of the most beloved singers of her time before she became an inventor. Jenny Lind \u2014 the most celebrated vocalist of the 19th century, who inspired Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s tale \u201cThe Nightingale\u201d by breaking his heart<\/a> \u2014 considered her one of her only two spiritual sisters in music, alongside Clara Schumann<\/a>. <\/p>\n

On the cusp of forty, Margaret invented a device to test and train her vocal powers \u2014 a membrane stretched over the mouth of a receiver attached to a megaphone-shaped tube, into which she would sing. To render her voice visible, she would place various powders atop the rubber diaphragm and watch the vibrations scatter the particles, much like cosmic rays scatter subatomic particles in a cloud chamber<\/a>. She experimented with different designs: various tube shapes, fine silk and soft rubber for the membrane, sand, lycopodium powder, and flower seeds for the medium.<\/p>\n

She called her device eidophone<\/em>, from the Greek eid\u014d<\/em> (\u201cto see\u201d) and ph\u014dn\u1e17<\/em> (\u201cvoice, sound\u201d), and became the first woman to present a scientific instrument of her own invention at the Royal Society. <\/p>\n

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Margaret Watts Hughes and her eidophone. (St. Louis Post Dispatch<\/em>, 1908.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But the eidophone gave her a far greater reward \u2014 a glimpse into another dimension of reality. <\/p>\n

One day in 1885, Margaret noticed something astonishing \u2014 as she sang into the eidophone modulating her pitch, the seeds she had placed atop the membrane \u201cresolved themselves into a perfect geometrical figure.\u201d Experimenting with her voice, she discovered that particular tones produced particular geometries \u2014 shapes that \u201calter in pattern or in position with each change of pitch\u2026 and increase in complexity of pattern as the pitch rises.\u201d <\/p>\n

She sang entire songs into the eidophone, capturing the imprint of each note. <\/p>\n

A new visual language for sound came abloom \u2014 forms partway between Feynman diagrams and Haeckel\u2019s radiolaria<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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And then she began to wonder what would happen if she placed a small heap of wet color paste instead of powder at the center of the diaphragm and covered it with a glass plate, singing different sustained notes into the eidophone. <\/p>\n

She held her long steady pitch, then watched wonder-smitten as modulations of intensity pushed the pigment outward into petals and pulled it back concentrically toward the center, each sound forming a different shape. She sang daisies and roses, she sang ferns and trees, she sang strange serpents of otherworldly beauty. The same tone formations produced the same flowers each time \u2014 daisies and primroses were easy to sing, pansies difficult \u2014 revealing the secret garden inside the voice. <\/p>\n

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She called these forms Voice-Figures<\/em> and came to think of them as echoes of the voice of God, hoping they would serve in some small way \u201cthe revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe.\u201d <\/p>\n

Long considered lost, they have been rediscovered and now endure in the collection of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery<\/a> in Wales.<\/p>\n

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In the final years of her life, looking back on her experiments, Margaret reflected:<\/p>\n

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Passing from one stage to another of these inquiries, question after question has presented itself to me, until I have continually felt myself standing before mystery, in great part hidden, although some glimpses seemed revealed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Born to working-class parents, the daughter of a cemetery supervisor, Margaret began giving music lessons to homeless children in the basement of her house. Overcome with tenderness for them, she felt she had to do more and used the income from her music career to found several orphanages in North London. Upon her death, the Times<\/em> eulogized \u201cthe penetrating sweetness of her voice, both in speech and in song, her glowing faith, and her great magnetic power [that] had an extraordinary effect on the roughest and most unpromising children.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the novelist Emilie Barrington visited one of the orphanages, she was moved to see that instead of curtains or blinds, the windows were shaded with Margaret\u2019s bright voice-figures, which appeared as something out of a dream, out of Alice in Wonderland<\/em> \u2014 \u201cstrange, beautiful things,\u201d she marveled, \u201csuggesting objects in Nature, but which are certainly neither exact repetitions nor imitations of anything in Nature.\u201d <\/p>\n

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While elsewhere in London Florence Nightingale was writing about the healing power of beauty<\/a>, Margaret Watts Hughes seems to have understood that the colorful voice-figures were more than decoration in the lives of these abandoned children, that inside each person, even the loneliest, dwells a secret garden of delight waiting to bloom under the warm rays of tenderness, that perhaps voice only exists to give tenderness a vessel. <\/p>\n

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Couple with these visualizations of consciousness<\/a> by Margaret Watts Hughes\u2019s contemporary Benjamin Betts (one of which became the cover of Figuring<\/em><\/a>) and pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott\u2019s visualizations of scientific phenomena<\/a>, then revisit Hannah Fries\u2019s poem \u201cLet the Last Thing Be Song\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a tender love letter to the voice. <\/p>\n

HT Public Domain Review<\/a> via Sophie Blackall<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n