Seeing Voices, Margaret Watts Hughes, and the Science of the Invisible

Okay, finding handles for things was so there was so much pressure on that and I remember my first email address I ended up being fru-fru after Imogen heaps band, so I was just like, "Oh, that's so good. You peaked. You peaked." I honestly did. Like, thinking about my music case in eighth grade, I'm like, "Oh, she knows what she's doing." Now I only listen to competitors. There will be blood. Run for your life. Go on, say, go on, say your last goodbye. There will be blood. You're gonna die. You're never making, never making, through the night. There will be blood. Hello, and welcome to Drawing Blood. My name is Kristi Slobogen. I'm Emma Merkel. And today we are talking about Margaret Watts Hughes, who's a Welsh singer/scientific instrument inventor/artist who was born in 1842 and died in 1907. And so today in this episode, we're talking about some of the objects that she produced and from them we are talking about the overlaps of sight and sound, the role of wonder and affect and art and entertainment in science. We are talking about spiritualism and the occult, also in science and scientific imagery. I talk about the history of sound recording. We've also got just for fun. We talk about cats and dissected ears. And we're so excited for you to listen to it. And I don't think we have any content notes except for animal cruelty? Yes, weirdly. Anyway, let us know what you think and make sure that you go to our show notes to see all of the images and to our website. You can see the carousel of images and the text that we referenced in our episode. Okay, so Emma has brought me a couple of images. So I've just opened up this first image and it is a lot. It's abstract. I think it's a totally abstract piece, although it does almost have a sense of like an underwater world, like algae or coral or like things that end up making musical sounds in the Little Mermaid, like in that one song under the sea. It's like a it's a deep yellow kind of ochre color with these emanating shapes that are coming from like the bottom of, I don't know if it's a canvas or maybe it's on something smoother like glass or wood panel. It is on glass. Yeah. Okay, it's on glass. And so from the bottom of the rectangle of glass, you have these almost brush strokes reaching up. And then from the right corner, you've got another mollusk shaped brush stroke reaching down. And then on the left side of the glass, you have this large kind of oyster shaped. I'm making it very nautical. I don't know if that's the right direction to go. No, but I get that vibe too. It's like under the sea vibes. Yeah, yeah, it's under the sea. And then the background is this pretty even. It seems brushed yellow ochre color. I keep saying brush strokes or emanations or like shapes coming out of the corners or the sides. One other quality I just want to draw your attention to is also just the immense level of detail. Yeah. If you were to zoom in, you get the impression that okay, take that like oyster form you were talking about. You see, there's like striations on it. It almost looks, you know, like with a photographic negative. If you zoom down, you could just keep going. Yeah. Yeah, it almost it looks feathery. Yeah. Which is again, like we're taking all of these kind of metaphors from the natural world or or ties to the natural world. Even though it is just, I mean, you said it's on glass. So to me now, I'm like, okay, so it's yellow paint on glass. Yeah, abstract, totally. Yellow pigment, yeah, theoretically. But it's beautiful. Yeah, they're very beautiful. Beautiful. Shall we move on to the second one? Yes. Oh, okay, this one is let, well, my first instinct is that this one is less purely abstract. I mean, of course, I was drawing connections to shapes in nature in the first one, but this one feels more purposefully representative. Like it looks like the way that you would draw a tree, right? It seems like it has a dark blue trunk going up with branches coming out of it and then lighter leaves. And then it's almost like this tree is like within a rock formation or within some other natural formation. And then this blue natural scene that I'm reading here is in an oval and then the really ornate like Victorian looking gold frame around it. I mean, I absolutely agree. It's more like a landscape, but it's interesting how the frame also makes you want to read it like more of a picture. Oh, yeah. Is this very small? Okay, one of the frustrating things about these objects is there's not a ton of information about them available online. I think that this one is pretty small. It's giving miniature. It is giving miniature. And I say that partly because of the quality of the gold work, but also because of the person who produced them, you know, she worked with sizes from as small to the head of a pin. Oh, cool. To like something that's more the size of an A4 sheet of paper, which I think the first one is more on this sort of A4 side. Yeah. And I think this one is, I don't think this is the size of the head of a pin, but I do think it's a miniature. Yeah, it really feels like a miniature. I mean, even in the sense of like the miniature portraits that you see in the National Portrait Gallery in London, like have these little frames like this. So it's it's like taking from that tradition. That's and I'm sure we'll talk about Anna Atkins, but I think because of the blue and because of this almost like fun like form, we've talked about her in previous episodes, but she produced these, you know, blue cyanotypes, which is basically light exposed directly onto an object, which produces an imprint below it. And it's that blue and white and the natural form of plants, exactly. Yeah. Shall we look at the thread very quickly? Oh, okay. This is a different context. It looks like the others were just like with the little frame and the second one, just what I would assume was an artwork. This looks like a scientific text because it is multiple similar images where they could be abstract or could be platforms. And they're in black and white and there are six on a page next to something that looks like a scientific instrument on the right. You've got like images that are labeled underneath with things like daisy form seaweed or landscape form, which looks the most like the first one, even without color. Another one says tree form, which is like that second image that we just talked about. And one that says cross vibration figure, which I think is the only one that's not a plant. And then on the right, I don't know if it's for different scientific instruments or for parts of the same one, but they look almost like pipes and they're labeled A, B, C, you know, different parts of it. And do these change how you think about the images, which produced by the same person in the same way using the same object? Yeah. I think that, I mean, just seeing those first two, I would have pictured them, you know, the first one on a wall somewhere in someone's home or in a gallery. The second one, I would have pictured like sitting on someone's desk or like even in something that you can carry around in your pocket, like you would like a miniature portrait. This one places those first two images in completely different contexts that are more scientific, which I shouldn't be surprised about seeing as that's what the podcast is about. But, you know, the first one reads as capital A, art, like abstract art. And then seeing this, I'm like, oh, maybe it belongs in a different world besides that of like galleries or museums, you know. Yeah, and I'm especially struck with this final one by almost the range of scientific imagery that seems to be indicated. We have the diagrammatic on the right with the illustration of the instrument. We have something that looks like a microscopic slide on the bottom right with a fund form or even the pansy form. You know, we have what looks like that cross-fibration figure could almost be a very early botanical painting of some sort. But also, you know, I mean, maybe it's because I'm reading cross-fibration form, but the kind of striations on that are also making me think like EKG machine or something that measures like a heartbeat or bingo. So, these are all figures produced by the direct action of the human voice. The visualizations of sound. Okay, so vibration. Yeah, okay, I see where I got that from. So does that mean like that some of the scientific instrument diagrams on the right or something where would like blow out or like make a sound into it? Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to let me tell you let me tell you what these objects are and break your suspense. Please. Yeah. So each of these objects was produced by this incredible woman called Margaret Watts Hughes or Megan Watts Hughes, Megan being the Welsh form of Margaret. And they're all created between the years like 1885 and I would say 1900. We don't have exact dates around a lot of them, but that's sort of a general range. And she's a fascinating figure. She came up tangentially in some of the research. I've been doing at the moment because she moved in these circles that I work on mostly, which is these sort of upper middle class artistic writers, scientists, philanthropists in London, especially, you know, in the 1880s, 90s, early 1900s. Yeah, and she's fascinating. She trained as a singer at the Royal Academy of Music and also was considered by some people to be one of the greatest vocalists of her of her generation. And, you know, ended up becoming this philanthropist. She founded a home for boys, which I found referred to in the most Victorian way ever as a home for homeless street urchins. Yeah. Yeah. So these are all a range of images, but she called voice figures and they are produced using that apparatus you saw. So she'd let a little air go into the tube and then form a seal with her mouth. And she would sing into the tube. And at the top of the tube is a little membrane of India rubber. So like a stretchy vibrating membrane. Yeah. And she would put a variety of substances on top because she realized that when she sang through them and the membrane vibrated, it created these incredible patterns. But again, I'm like, okay, voice, little mermaid aquatic figures, like that, you know, the fact that this was invented by a singer is really interesting that it took me to that story, like that's bizarre. And I think that a lot of these themes, the aquatic, the voice, I think we're going to come back to a lot. The very earliest writing of her also mentions these aquatic scenes and describes these as almost like underwater emanations is an interesting word. And I partly wonder if that has to do with, you know, sound as a vibratory medium creating waves. You know, we have sound waves. And there's this natural analogy already plus then the more like a meabic sea urchin anemone forms that it creates. It's also giving, I think Anna Atkins herself worked with seaweed and algae. And one of the objects that these remind me of is actually these, uh, women's scrapbooks from the 19th century where they would very carefully paste and decorate and arrange algae and is a really interesting form of almost, um, yeah, like science at the edges, science by people who are not, you know, who are not in mainstream scientific practice, which I think is going to be a big theme by women. Yes, exactly. By women amateurs, I think that's also the amateur. Yes, part of it's also important. So yeah, so like, okay, so she discovered that if you, if you flood this, this membrane with, with sand initially with like the fluff from seeds or she starts then working with like milk and water and various liquids. And if you put pigment, if you put like a, a color paste into it and sing into the tube, it creates these incredible forms like the end up making those burst images that we looked at. Yes, exactly. Cool. So this discovery for her is actually initially accidental according to her narrative in 1885. She was trying to test the intensity of her voice, which is why she had the sort of rubber membrane. And she ends up creating this instrument that she calls the idofone, which is that, uh, the instrument that you saw. And it comes from idol, which is Greek meaning the image, the figure, the form, uh, literally that which is seen. And the phone, yeah, which is obviously the Greek word for sound. And those are our two themes for today is sound and vision. I think quite obviously since these are visualizations of sound. I don't know, I think that's great. I love that. And she, she's publishing on this from I think 1891 onwards. Uh, before that already, she displayed these in a variety of places, which really speaks to their hybridity as objects. I think she displayed them at the Royal institution, which is a scientific institution, which is rare for women, the Royal Society, also the musical association. And then surprisingly or excitingly for me, also the arts and crafts exhibition and the new gallery, which are these, you know, new avant-garde gallery sites. So it's interesting that you said you saw it on the on the gallery wall. That's, that's like, um, Romero Svaro. Remember we talked about how she had like, how Romero Svaro's paintings were displayed in like scientific contexts and an artistic one. So it's interesting that that's another woman working in both spaces or being seen in both spaces. Absolutely. And there's actually more links, I think, that we will get into. And the final place that she displays them, which is where her friend, who is my introduction to this topic called Emily Russell Barrington, who's an art writer from the late 19th century, saw them in 1889, was almost like stained glass in the home that she built for these boys, which is not fascinating. So when Barrington sees them, she describes them with this almost religious language. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, because they're basically like stained glass and she says they have a touch of fairy land about them. Oh, I love that. So because so light, yeah, I'm picturing them as a window. And so light, I imagine, would be amazing through those. Yeah. And in the book that she ends up publishing about this in 1904 called The Ida Phone Geometrical and Natural Forms, produced by vibrations of the human voice, she goes through the variety of types. And this, she has this quite a clear, very Victorian developmental narrative that they're these primitive geometric forms at first. And then these slowly develop into more complex forms, culminating in those more complex images like the first one you looked at with the cross vibrational frequencies, and then ultimately in those sort of more landscape-y tree forms. And not surprising, at all, given the time when she's making these, that there's also such a strict taxonomy of them, and almost like a ranking. Absolutely. And one of the only people who's written about her work is someone called Rob Mullen de Ross. And he writes that she sets out quote a rudimentary phylogenetics of four. Oh, yeah. And I think that's absolutely right. And then there is to tease another theme when her friend Emily Russell Barrington sees these, you know, she says that the images are perhaps what a dream might make of the impressions left by nature, perfectly drawn designs of shell-like forms, photographically precise renderings of such things as Alice in Wonderland might have come upon, had she tumbled down to the bottom of the sea. So I think it's so interesting that like so much of what you touched on is in there from like the science to the wonder, to like photography, to the sea. And like children's fairy tales like Alice in Wonderland, Little Mermaid, like absolutely, which probably because she's seeing them in a home for boys. Yeah. Yeah. It's like strengthened by that. But also this sense of this wonder and the evocation that I mentioned earlier of a touch of fairyland gets into another context for these, which is I think religious and more specifically occult, which is why it's interesting to me that you brought up remedios thorough. Yeah, because that is not immediately where my mind went just looking at the images, right? It was science-y abstract, right? I would not have. I mean, you said stained glass, so that as some ways, Catholic immediately places it into a religious area. But yeah, I'm really interested to hear more about that. Yeah, and also it's also really interesting to me that you say that because as someone who works a lot in spiritualist imagery, that was immediately a part to me from this. And we're going to get into some examples, which you'll see, but I'm not shocked that someone looking at these in 1889 was like, "Huh, fairies." Actually, now that I think about it, there was like a exhibition at the Courtauld, right? Was it Georgiana? Yes, okay, because as soon as I was like, "Oh yeah, abstract woman spiritualists, that." There are other examples of this. Okay, interesting. Yeah, cool, cool. Okay, so before we get into some of the really juicy stuff, I think that it's important to situate these objects in a scientific context, and that's sort of the history of sound recording. We are very much by like 1885 in the world of, you know, the early sound recording machines, the first recordings of the human voice, which is either 1860 or 1877, depending on who you ask. We have, you know, the telephones in development, soon we have a radio. So it's really we're at the outset of, you know, the explosion of sound recording devices and eventually payback of sounds. And one thing actually that Melinda Ross points out is that from the start, because of how early sound recordings are formed, sound recordings are as much visual and textual concerns as audible ones. Like in the history of early sound recording, you cannot disentangle the visual from the auditory. So it is he mean that like the first sound recorder automatically took the sound down in a visual way. Like again, I'm picturing like EKG machines. Exactly, yes. Okay, you're absolutely right. So for instance, one of the earliest sound recording devices is by, I'm not doing the accent, by Edward Leon's Scott DeMartinville. Yes. This is 1857, and it's called the phonotograph. And it's basically very similarly to what's used. It's a vibrating diaphragm, which is connected to like a hog's bristle, scratching into sut coated paper or glass, you know, so as the diaphragm vibrates, the bristle traces out a line in the sut. So yeah, so it's like, you know, sound to be recorded has to first be made visible. And this is the same way that early registrations, for instance, the pulse are happening, you know, you mentioned EKG machines. EKG machines are the modern version of what is known as the graphic method in 19th century science, and which is not just related to sound, but a whole host of instrumentation, like early efforts to register the inner workings of the body through like reading the pulse. So, you know, you have a little device that's on the pulse point, and that is connected to like a lever connected to like a stylus that traces onto a sheet of sut blackened paper. Very cool. And what's really interesting to me about this and about it being called the graphic method is how much this is about like legibility from the start and how much you're thinking about it as a form of writing. And this is the same way that early sound recording devices work. And I think that is Melinda Ross's point about sort of the visual and the audible. Well, and it's so interesting that the phrase scientific instruments, you know, we use instruments in terms of music as well. Yeah. And so like I hadn't made that connection before, but just the fact that that word is used automatically privileges sound in a really interesting way. Yeah, I'd also never thought of that. That's super, that's super interesting. Yeah. But it's this very, you know, thinking of science and how we we've talked about this a lot in previous episodes, but like how we binarize the world in the sort of western world view, how it's like science, male writing, logos, the word, and then it's like art, female singing, the voice, right. You know, but also and how science, like the whole scientific project from like the Enlightenment onwards or earlier is about unveiling or making visible the truth of the the feminine nature, right? Like absolutely. Yes, we're viewing her. Yes, we talk a lot of the quote that I think of all the time is Victor Frankenstein saying he will pursue nature to ha hiding places. It's a rape metaphor, right? Yeah, but that but the visualizing the thing that is that is natural, like, okay, if it's written down, then it is within the masculine realm of culture and science versus if it's not visible, then it's then it's unobtainable or it's not controllable, and it's not you're not able to make it masculine. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not just making it visible, but making it writing, making it legible, you know, rationalizing it, turning it into logos. But what's so interesting about what's used about her pictures is that they resist that to me. Like they're not, they don't even visibly, they don't even look like a line of writing. You know, we'll link to some of those EKG things, but a lot of these the early EKG machines are explicitly, you know, they're intended to be a form of a new form of writing that can be read, a new script, a new language, something that is legible turning. Yes, like you said, in this case, the invisible inner processes of the body or the invisible processes of sound into something that can be actually like red and categorized, whereas hers, they don't even look like writing. It's not the like black and white, it's not a line that goes from left to right. They are simultaneous, they're abstract and they're opaque. Well, it's so interesting, you know, talking about, talking about how the visualization of sound is really the focus of this episode is making me think of this book called Instruments in the Imagination by Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman. And one of their arguments, I mean, they have a lot of excellent arguments and I'll go into one of them, I think, in a bit more detail. But one of the smaller arguments they have, this like sound and sight are the two things that are most privileged in the history of scientific instruments, especially in the instruments, and this is many of them, but especially in the instruments that blur our science and entertainment, which is where we haven't used yet, but I wonder how that fits into what's uses work. Like if there's an element of spectacle to it. Yeah, also because she's a trained, she's a trained singer. Yeah, you know, which is a performance. Yeah, that's not a normal scientific tool. Exactly, but but the fact that that element of entertainment is so wrapped up in the history of scientific instruments, then makes it slightly less surprising that a singer, I keep imagining her as an opera singer, like singing arias into this pipe like object. What I will say is that people are always talking about how unbelievably skilled a vocalist she is. Okay. And a lot in her writings, you can tell she's like, you have to hold the note at this pitch at this frequency. And she's all about like she gets the different effects by, you know, singing different pitches, holding different notes, loudness, softness, closeness, further away, resonance, etc. Also thinking about how so often the talent of singing is something that is measurable by lung capacity, like by range, like it's something that again is subsumed from this kind of feminine, creative, immeasurable thing of just like beautiful singing into something that is measurable and masculine and scientific, which is like, oh, you can hit these notes. Your lungs can hold this, like you can in your diaphragm as this ability to do this, like yeah, and it falls right into this category of like men ruining something by trying to turn it into a series of like starting metrics as soon as they get their hands on it. Yeah. All of this is so interesting, like gender, privileging sounds, sound and sight. God, that's kind of a tongue twister. And again, the idea of scientific instruments, instruments, music, like there's all this sort of tangling here. And I know that we will definitely get into the occult and like obviously your research areas, but I found it so interesting. And Hankins and Silverman argue this in their book, Instruments in the Imagination, that the things that we would classify as scientific instruments, like hard science things, especially like in the 17th century, you know, high tech things, like telescope, microscope, etc. We're thought of as instruments of, quote, natural magic, again, usually visual, natural magic. So things that were meant not only to, you know, aid and discovery and science, etc. But meant to evoke wonder, like that was one of their main purposes. And again, there's the line between science and entertainment, science and art, but like wonder was a massive part of the cultural weight of these objects. And so I think that's important to remember with the images that we're looking at now and looking at, you know, really early microscopic images, like they were meant to impress people and to entertain them. And then that kind of shifted to the quote-unquote serious, or like we were talking about like masculine scientific mediation in the 18th and 19th century. And like yes, it lost that idea of natural magic, but it still held the possibility of entertainment. And wonder, I mean this goes right into the 19th century, that absolutely wonder remains part of science. And a big thing we talk about and write about a lot in the sort of science, spiritualism part of the academic world is like, as I've said on this podcast before, in the 19th century, spiritualism is basically an alternative science, spiritualism being one of these occult late Victorian religions. And one of the reasons that possible is because the 19th century is never fully disenchanted. You know, that science retains, especially the natural sciences, this commitment to religion in some forms, spiritual belief in other forms, or just wonder and performance. And that right at the heart of the 19th century in both like science and faith and the art forms that are produced as part of this is wonder. And music is part of that wonder as well. Like the one example that I think connects to what's used in a really interesting way is something from 1725, called the Ocula Harps Accord. Have you heard of this? No. Okay, so never I don't think it ever existed in the real world. It was a thought experiment by someone named Louis Bertrand Castell. And he was using Newton's color tone analogy, which is like Newton believed that color corresponded to the the notes on the scale, right? And I'll link to an image where it's like a very scientific diagram. And it's like don't worry me Faso Latino, Roger Biv essentially. And so this guy Castell is like, oh, I'm going to have this harps Accord so that deaf people can experience music visually. And so every note will correspond with a color. And it'll paint something that then can be understood as a song. Which I can't see me nodding in desiastically. And can I, this is a total sidebar. But in reading about this, one of the things that Castell mentions when he's riding up the Ocula Harps Accord, the thing that he compares it to is this other thought experiment instrument that like blurred science art and entertainment called the cat piano, which is horrible. But it's a bunch of cats and cages arranged by the pitch of their yowl. And then each note pulls their tail or actually it might have been like drives a stake through their tail, which is horrible. I'm going to imagine this pulls their tail. But and so like each note would make the cat yowl. And Castell was like, oh, it's a great idea. But like that wouldn't produce harmony. So my aunt's the problem with it. And that's the problem with it. Anyway, so I went on this whole tangent about cat pianos. And I can also, I have an image of one of those. And it is very fun. But anyway, yeah. So the fact that like even the century before what he was like, there was very much this tradition of coming up with how color, sound, and song and that interesting part of someone who's heart of hearing experiencing sound. But yeah, how do you combine all these things into something that is capital S scientific, I think is really fascinating. Yeah. And actually, I don't know if I mentioned it. But one of the reasons that there was this big commitment to visualizing sound in the 19th century actually did have to do with deaf people and people who are heart of hearing and visualizing sound for them. This is a very complicated and quite ableist history that we're going to hopefully get to later. Yeah. But there's so much firstly, okay, because you've mentioned natural magic and wonder and I want us to get to spiritualism and occultism in these images. Do you know why Newton was so committed to having seven colors in the rainbow? It's because he has his own occult alchemical tendencies and he needs it to correspond to like the number seven within this whole like esoteric. We talked about this in the Romero's viral episode, right? Did we? We may have briefly mentioned the rule of seven, but I totally didn't think about that at all. Exactly. And that's, you know, so it's like, yeah, wonder, music, colors, visualization. But the thing I want to flag like, okay, so yeah, all the stuff are the wonder we've touched on some of the spiritual and occult elements. But the thing that's really important for me to stress is that sonic media and occultism are inextricable like from the stars. This has to do with a few things. One of them for me is the absolute centrality of sound to spiritualism, which is at this point in the century, still the most popular form of occultism. So we've said it in previous episode, but it's like the belief that spirits continue to exist in the world and you can communicate with them. Right. And they can communicate by a sound like they can speak to you or like make noises, or like table wrapping and stuff like that. Exactly. So they have many ways of communicating back. We talked about Walter's voice in the Marjory episode so the medium can become an amplification device for the voice of a spirit or spirit can speak seemingly in the air, but they always need a medium, ie a transmitter, a scientific instrument. Right. There's a reason we have these analogies between medium media, you know, transmission, and earlier you said emanation as well. Yes. And for folks who are interested, our Marjory episode is season one, episode two. That's if you want to hear more about spiritualism and sciences and science, go there. So thank you for that. We'll go for a marketing team. Just want to make sure people know where to look, you know. So yeah, so you hear, you know, spirit wrappings, ie like knocks on the table during a say-ance is the very first spirit communication that is defined as spiritualist in the 19th century. So from the start we have sound, but it also goes further than that. Like for me, sonic media are like always already haunted. If you want to think about it just in like a playback sense, what do they do but bring back the voices of the dead? And that I think has so much more of an effective, you know, we've grown up in an age where it's extremely normal to open Spotify and listen to Louis Armstrong who died. I don't know how many decades ago, you know, but this idea that you can listen to the voices of the dead is a profoundly new phenomenon at this period. And of course it is linked to spiritualism. And that it's just maybe think of Derrida and archive in archive fever. He talks about like the archive as like listening to the answering machine like someone left a voice message, but they've died and he uses the voice and sound recording as the metaphor to really drive home like the ghostliness of the archive and how it relates to death, which I think fits exactly in what you're saying. And there's something about it to me and I don't think it's just because we're so habituated to photography. I sense it in the archival record too, but I think that sound is even more embodied and affecting than, you know, photography, which is another great early spiritualist media, right? Which is like they both address themselves to the body and this is a huge preoccupation in Victorian physiology at the time. But you know, sound waves also by the fact that they resonate in your body, like have like a direct affective connection that I think is more startling. Like to hear the voice of the dead and to see a photo of the dead have different affective resonances I think. I have had this argument with my students in every class that I've taught because I I always teach this example that Susanne Bruneff writes about where this video game BioShock uses a photograph of a patient as part of their like material to make their villains in the game. And then they also use the recording of labor breathing of a dying patient as like the sound scape of the video game. And I get such interesting conversations with my students every time I teach this with like, is it and you said like more you think the sound is more affecting. I tend to go more towards the photograph of the patient's face as more affecting, but people are always on both sides of that. So yeah, I hadn't really interesting. And also there's this idea that is really taken up also within occultism and spiritualism that there is something about the voice perhaps because you cannot see it in the first instance that links it to a more fundamental reality than the visual does. So constantly and like spiritualist treatises, the material world around us, the visible world is seen as like a lesser reality, right, than the higher reality which is invisible, which is metaphysical, whereas sound I think because it is invisible, but also because it is emotional, because people's bodies are so immediately affected by it, whether it's a scream or whether it's like a symphony, you know, that they had this sense, that sound, that music connects on some level to like a deeper spiritual reality than the visible is capable of doing. I also wanted to bring up a very weird object that is just a slight sidebar, but it's another instance of how intricately the history of sound and history of sound recording is connected to the dead, which is, do you know about Alexander Graham Bell's, yeah, phonograph? Wait, is this the, oh, is the dissected ear? Yeah, oh, fuck, I thought I was going to teach you about it, do you know about it? Okay, hopefully, no, no, time please, tell the listeners. Yeah, no, I've only read about this peripherally and I've never actually seen it. So seeing this image that you sent me is wild. So this is a model. Oh, a model, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm going to be piecing this together, so I probably will get things wrong, but he got an ear from a cadaver, right? Yeah. And then he used it, if I'm remembering correctly, to visualize what the ear would be hearing. Like, he took the inner parts of the ear and somehow hooked it up to something. Am I on the right track? And then like, he played sound and visualized it, like, drew it. Yeah, so it's, so the vibration end is exactly the same as the other media we've been talking about. It's like, he has the corpse ear and they have something that is connected to the ear drum in the ear, like the inner bones of the ear. Yeah, connected to like a stylus that traces on to a sheet of smoked glass. What else kind of guy? I know, I know, he's a weird, not fantastic guy, which we will possibly get to later. I love that we're talking about ears again last episode. It was like ears and planted on the body and now it's, now it's analog. Yeah. So would Margaret Watts use have known about these kind of other experiments with sound, with telephones, with recording? Like, where does she fit into this kind of timeline? And how does this relate to her to her artwork? So she definitely would have been aware. I mean, this is like, it's all in the air at the moment and explicitly in her book. She links back to some of the earlier, you know, she got the idea for her instrument from some of these earlier individuals and she's explicitly framing herself. It's really interesting. She explicitly frames herself as contributing to the science of acoustics. But, and once again, I think in a very 19th century way, she makes the explicit connection to also the religious resonances of this for her and the religious importance of this for her. And it's interesting, even in that essay on her by Barrington, Barrington says, do they not suggest that many more things in the world about us may have been created by sound, which I think is quite clearly an illusion to, you know, the original voice of God let there be light. Yeah. And there's like declarative, yeah. Or even like the idea in a lot of like, annunciation paintings, like I'm thinking of Van Eyck's annunciation, but there are lots of other examples where the word of God is visualized with like, really ornate gold lettering and it's often thought like, or it can be said like, oh, the word of God is also what then like, impregnated Mary, because it's not like a bodily impregnation. And it's in an announcement, annunciation, yeah, exactly. So like that, that religious importance of the word of God or like some other spiritual entity, yeah, really long history there and really interesting. And also it's interesting that you bring that up also because very often, you know, that is the word more than the voice, but I think that there is a sense of untranslatability in it. And I'm thinking about often those paintings, you know, the the raised lettering is in like Hebrew or it's in a language that not necessarily everyone looking at the painting is going to be able to read. And it's also often raised. So it has this like tactile, sensorial quality as well, also with the gold. Yeah. No, that it's like communicating, yeah, on some other level. And it makes me feel like so what's used herself explicitly links her project to the voice of God. And it's interesting that when she writes about this, she also writes about the affective experience of it, which I think is so interesting when we think also of what these early women who are involved in science are bringing to the table and how they are engaging with this very like objectivity, masculinity, irrationality, feel that she talks explicitly about the feeling and like the affect that she undergoes and she links this to her faith. So she basically says passing from one stage to another of these inquiries, I felt myself standing before mystery in great part hidden, although some glimpses seem revealed, hope has come to me that these humble experiments may aid in the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organized universe that took its shape at the voice of God. That's really cool. And again, I can see it fitting into or why she would think that this work not as worthy of stained glass, but like being placing it into the context of being like stained glass in this, you know, boys home, which I assume that her philanthropical side was also influenced by her religion. Oh, absolutely. And we don't know, I mean, I found Malinda Ross says she's not a spiritualist. I mean, I've no evidence that she was or wasn't, but you know, she was a non-conformist, she was a congregationalist, and there's a lot of permeability, especially between more unconventional religious beliefs at the time. So you can be a congregationalist and a theosophist or a spiritualist, you know, it's not hard edged. But what is really interesting to me is like whether or not she was a spiritualist, firstly, her ideas immediately get taken up by theosophists and occultists and spiritualists. We see it in their periodical press. You know, they're talking about these artworks. Yeah. And they're writing like Henry Steele Olcott in 1890, who's a big, big figure in the theosophy movement, you know, talks about the pictures drawn out of the world of invisible forms by the vibrations of Mrs. Hughes's glorious voice. And he actually believes that while we're seeing some of the physical processes of her brain via the voice, yeah. And so what this gets us into is like the last sort of big visual comparison I wanted to draw was something I adjusted to at the beginning, which is how much these remind me of occult media and images, many of which are explicitly being developed by researchers into spiritualism and occultism as a science or into spiritualistic phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance and who are trying to visualize these processes. So I'll just show you a couple very quickly. Okay, so Emma sent me to, I assume, spiritualist images in black and white. And one of them looks almost like sea urchins again. But kind of like these explosive white shapes on a darker background that with like these spiky bits coming off of them. And then the other is more like I'm immediately getting wind. But it's like things have been languidly drawn across a darker background. That being said, they look almost photographic. And that could be just because of the black and white. But yeah, I can definitely see some parallels between these pieces, these objects, these artworks. However, we want to categorize them and the watch use things that we looked at first. Yeah, so they're basically cameraless photographs. So it's like a sensitized photographic plate against which he recorded a variety of things. Sorry, this is Epoly Tbachuk who's like working in the 1890s and he's trying to create almost photographs of this like vital spiritualist force. I mean, he has this idea that we're all living in a sea that we cannot see and SEA that we cannot SEE. And that we can capture like the radiation of thoughts and feelings using science. So like holding a sensitized photographic plate against someone's forehead and their thoughts like emerging onto this place and creating images, which has such a parallel to Margaret Hughes in the voice. Oh, absolutely. For me, you know, intensively, yeah, visualizing the invisible. And he also believed you could photograph states like grief. Oh, yeah. And then he actually has, he did some like horrifying things speaking of the capyano, like fastened alive pigeon to a board with like a photographic plate and then slit its throat. Oh, so that the photograph showed a picture of its death agony. I don't love that. Yeah, I know. But but what he's capturing basically is like affect as psychic force, like invisible affect as psychic force, which becomes visible becomes visualized. Yeah. And for me, it also reminds me of some of another occult visual media that has an even more direction towards Hughes, which is any essence thought forms. Thought forms is from 1905, I think. Okay. Oh, I don't know which one is sent you first. Okay, let's start with this one. I sent you a link. And of course, all of our images will be linked in our show notes on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Okay, you said this is any bessent. That's how you say that. Yes. And Charles Ledbyte, but she's the interesting one to me. They're they're they're a pair. Okay, this is different from what to use for sure. But what we've got here is kind of a pretty like naturalistic watercolor. It looks like of a cathedral. But then from the main tallest tower of the cathedral is erupting, I think is the correct word here. Is erupting this like riot of colors in this. I mean, I immediately think Kandinsky. Yeah, same. These almost jazzy lines of bright colors against like a yellow field, but like purples and reds and oranges and greens, all erupting from this. I mean, it's a really stark contrast between the cathedral at the bottom of the page. I assume it's on paper and the the color erupting from at the top, which yeah, very much is giving like, is this trying to represent like the music coming out of the cathedral? It is or what are we what are we looking at here? Yeah. So firstly, this is the book where Bessent is explicitly citing what's Hughes and her experiments. And this, yeah, and what she is depicting here. Okay, so thought forms the book. Similarly to the Bathook thing is interested in this idea or invested in this idea that we can see, it's like aura stuff basically that people's thoughts and feelings and affect, produces in sort of the astral plane, visual resonances of like color that those with a correct training and especially clairvoyant training can see and can represent. Yeah, so in this painting, it's a bit complex because she starts or they start sort of somewhat like what's Hughes with more simple abstract forms like, okay, what does rage look like? What does love look like? And then it builds to like something like religious feeling in a church when you're listening to the music of Mendelssohn is what creates this like complex outpouring that we see here. So it certainly is related to music and this I think in my memory, three different illustrations in the book of these various cathedrals and sites of religious activity with sound pouring out of them. But the images that remind me a bit more of what's Hughes are some of the more basic breaking down of the forms. Yeah, yeah, so especially the one called an aspiration to infold all. Yeah, so these are much more abstract for sure. There's no like a digital button. It's these purple, I mean, I'm comparing them to angel wings or I'm thinking they look like angel wings, right? But this purple like a loop, almost like a ribbon. Yeah, but then it has that like lines of resonance into fear inside. Yeah, which look like the auditory vibrations almost. Yeah. And then on this like really bright yellow background. Yeah, so I can definitely see how that relates more to Watts Hughes' aesthetic. And then some of the simpler forms like, you know, radiating affection or the intention to know which are these more like simple geometric forms really remind me of Watts Hughes and some of her like more geometric earlier forms that she's talking about singing into into existence. And one of the reasons I bring bring up Bessent is I think that she's a really interesting corollary to Watts Hughes. So like Watts Hughes, she sees a lot of her work as a theorist and as a clairvoyant as relating to science. She's a fascinating figure. We've talked about her before in terms of free thought. She was pro-birth control. She was a radical feminist. She was a Fabian socialist, like absolutely fascinating figure. But she trained as a scientist and she ended up failing a lot of her exams and she felt it was because of her radicalism. And so she ends up developing this clairvoyant science of her own, which I think is fascinating. And the really fantastic essay on this that I would recommend is by Sumangala Bhutacharya called the Victorian occult atom. Because another thing she did was in the 1890s. Basically she and Ledbyter in this book that they published called occult chemistry and to take this unhinged project in which they try to clairvoyantly see into the structures of atoms. Amazing. And yeah, and they published the images which also look like some of the early geometric forms of Watts Hughes. I think it's really interesting that again you're talking about like this woman who is yeah trained as a scientist but is finding her own way around a particular masculine field or like structure and like finding her own way into it that includes visualization and art which we see in Watts Hughes. And yeah, I just think that that question of like science as rigid, science as control, science as masculine. And these women who are finding their ways around it is really, I think that's a major theme of what we're talking about here at Watts Hughes. Absolutely. And that part of that is sort of also tie the religion thing back into that is that they are using science but the ultimate goal is not knowledge of the atom or a deeper understanding of sound. Those are effects of what they are doing. But the real goal in this very sort of religious or occult way is a deeper understanding of the vital forces of the universe, a better knowledge of God. But that feels interesting to me too, that the science is part, explicitly part of a more religious and an affective process. I'm thinking about how Watts Hughes and you know Annie Besson and people like that are kind of flipping the idea that science is something that categorizes with numbers or that like makes things rigid with numbers. And so I'm kind of almost thinking about Watts Hughes and Alexander Graham Bell as to ends of that spectrum. And I'm thinking about it actually in the context of like measuring bodies and measuring ability. I mean, Watts Hughes is talking about like her voice, right? But she's not measuring, measuring necessarily the power of her voice ends up being something more creative and something that's not trying to figure out what is the norm or what is the ideal. And while you were speaking about this, I was thinking about Corinne McGuire's book measuring difference, numbering normal, where she talks about two technologies to the telephone and then spirometry and how both of these scientific instruments in the late 19th and 20th century were used to categorize normality within bodies. So the spirometer measured breath and then the telephone could measure how well you could hear. And it's a really interesting history because so, so like sound and breath, those are the two things that Watts Bell or oh my gosh, Watts Hughes is working with, right? So that's why I immediately thought of Corinne's book. But I think it's so interesting thinking about Watts Hughes and Graham Bell. Also, these people need to stop having three names. But as to ends of the spectrum because Alexander Graham Bell, whose mother was deaf and who came from a family of electrocutionists, said that one, you know, one of the reasons that he was so interested in the telephone and like transmitting sound was that he wanted to cure deafness, he wanted to make speech visible so that he could quote teach the deaf to speak. And I think that kind of really rigid controlling like this is what's normative, this is what you need to be doing is a very, what we've been talking about this whole time like masculine view of the body and a science and measuring, whereas Watts Hughes is thinking about the voice and sound in a much more kind of fluid, creative, affective manner that she's not trying to like impose her scientific instrument on like changing anybody. It's more like free form exploration. Do you see what I'm trying to say? I do and I want to say like more far listeners than for you because I know you feel similarly. It's not as simple as being like, oh, the woman who's making this, you know, is doing it for these reasons. The man who's doing these things is doing it for others. Well, I think we're more just thinking about that binary that gets re-inscribed in 19th century science between the masculine, the rational, the written word that we mentioned earlier and how the feminine is coded, you know, affective song, the voice. Yeah. And I think what's really interesting, I mean, there's also historical complications, obviously, between these two areas and one of which being, and Christine Ferguson's book Determined Spirits is a fantastic example of that. You know, even if within this binary, we're going to put rational, agnostic science on the one hand and, you know, hysterical, feminine, belief, or cultism on the other. We cannot split it so easily into like, you know, Alexander Graham Bell and the science is the racist, eugenicist, et cetera, one, and a cultism is not because, as her book points out, spiritualism, in fact, has deep roots in eugenicist, bio-deterministic, racist. Oh, it's still a 19th century phenomenon, and you best believe that there's segregation in heaven and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But I think what is what I think you're getting at and what I think about Margaret Watts-Hughes, that's so interesting, and Annie Besend, as well, in fact, is how they are through what they are producing, stepping into science and doing something interesting with it, doing something different with it, making these sort of opaque objects. I also think part of the reason I'm setting up this spectrum, like, between Watts-Hughes and Graham Bell, which, you know, is arbitrary in itself, but I'm also just, like, my reactions to their two objects that I'm thinking about here, like the dissected ear or the lovely abstract paintings on glass. I have a much more positive reaction to to hers than to his. So yeah, I think, to me, it's also just represented in the objects that we are representing each of those people. For sure. And I think also, like, what I find so endlessly interesting about, I find Watts-Hughes actually even more interesting than Besend in the art that they produce and the objects that they produce. But that, you know, her writings on the topic, on the one hand, keep stressing the skill that is needed, which is very that codes to me very much in terms of, like, the scientific identity of the 19th century, right? It's like the development of this skill that, you know, starts off the training of her voice, the control of her voice. But yeah, that she, you know, she's interested in this, like, idea of, like, the science of using the voice. But the science is linked to feeling, you know, she is not trying to disentangle that skill and sort of the, yeah, that there's this, on the one hand, this insistence on the skill, on the instrumentation, on the documentation. And on the other hand, she explicitly talks about the feelings that it brings up in her. And that there is space within her scientific practice for not just religious sentiment, but affect in general. And she talks about, you know, she says, in the act of singing shapeless matter into such symmetry and beauty of form, one cannot help feeling the presence of a power that is very strange. And she talks about how singers will know what she means. I love that. Yeah. And I don't know. Once again, I really recommend the Batacharya article about this because it reads any Besend as moving away from this idea of, like, the disinterested observer that is so important to sort of, like, masculinized objective science in this period. And towards something that is more implicated and involved and a science that doesn't need to pretend it's rid of faith or subjectivity or right or feeling or any of the other things we associate with art. Right. Doesn't need to put things into these boxes like, or that those boxes can be porous is kind of what I'm thinking. Yeah. And that something can be about the science of the voice and about the beauty of the voice and about the beauty of God. And it can be about scientific truth and religious truth and the truth of beauty. But that goes back to that idea of wonder that I was talking about. Absolutely. The early history of scientific instruments. And so, like, she's in an example of, like, that didn't die. That wonder is still very present. Do you have a final thought? Of, like, last words, I am constantly in wonder of you. Thank you, Christy. I would never chop off your ear and use it as part of either a scientific object or an art piece. Thank you so much. That means so much to me. [Music]