Abstract Summary
Among the many passing fascinations of turn of the century America, consider the eidophone pictures of Welsh singer Megan Watts Hughes. An accomplished vocalist, Watts Hughes discovered that singing into a mouthpiece connected to a resonant plate upon which had been placed a thin film of paste would cause the paste to contort into strange and wonderful shapes. By carefully modulating her voice as she sang into the mouthpiece-plate-paste apparatus — which she called the “eidophone” – Watts Hughes could cause pictures to appear at will: surreal landscapes, spiraling abstractions, even pansies, roses, and other flowers of specific type and species. It was notably difficult, however, to “sing a daisy,” she said, because of the extremely low tones and precise control required. This paper will take Watts Hughes’s pictures as a jumping off point from which to explore the field of experimental phonetics in the United States at the turn of the century. By no means the first instance of “hearing with the eyes,” as one scientist put it, Hughes’s “voice graphics” nevertheless caused a stir among physiologists, psychologists, and physicians in the United States who believed that transducing sound into vision was the best way to study speech. In the nuances of precisely-recorded human vocalizations – whether made from eidophones, vowel-tracers, phonoscopes, or other recording devices – practitioners of experimental phonetics found new methods for treating speech “disorders” and new ways for (literally) envisioning the neurological and cognitive roots of language. At the same time, the difficulty of “singing a daisy” wasn’t simply practical – in deciding on the meanings of the tracings that their machines produced, researchers also faced questions about formalism, aesthetics, interpretation, and the correspondence between representation and the notional real.
