“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous, that out of the cold silence of spacetime voice emerged, in all its warm loveliness — this vibrating interaction of energy and matter, this oscillating displacement of particles, that can give rise to a mother’s lullaby and the nightingale’s 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.

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, you could hear the voice of the dead.

And then voice became something you could see.

Margaret Watts Hughes (February 12, 1842–October 29, 1907) was already one of the most beloved singers of her time before she became an inventor. Jenny Lind — the most celebrated vocalist of the 19th century, who inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Nightingale” by breaking his heart — considered her one of her only two spiritual sisters in music, alongside Clara Schumann.

On the cusp of forty, Margaret invented a device to test and train her vocal powers — 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. 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.

She called her device eidophone, from the Greek eidō (“to see”) and phōnḗ (“voice, sound”), and became the first woman to present a scientific instrument of her own invention at the Royal Society.

But the eidophone gave her a far greater reward — a glimpse into another dimension of reality.

One day in 1885, Margaret noticed something astonishing — as she sang into the eidophone modulating her pitch, the seeds she had placed atop the membrane “resolved themselves into a perfect geometrical figure.” Experimenting with her voice, she discovered that particular tones produced particular geometries — shapes that “alter in pattern or in position with each change of pitch… and increase in complexity of pattern as the pitch rises.”

She sang entire songs into the eidophone, capturing the imprint of each note.

A new visual language for sound came abloom — forms partway between Feynman diagrams and Haeckel’s radiolaria.

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.

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 — daisies and primroses were easy to sing, pansies difficult — revealing the secret garden inside the voice.

She called these forms Voice-Figures and came to think of them as echoes of the voice of God, hoping they would serve in some small way “the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe.”

Long considered lost, they have been rediscovered and now endure in the collection of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery in Wales.

In the final years of her life, looking back on her experiments, Margaret reflected:

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.

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 eulogized “the 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.”

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’s bright voice-figures, which appeared as something out of a dream, out of Alice in Wonderland — “strange, beautiful things,” she marveled, “suggesting objects in Nature, but which are certainly neither exact repetitions nor imitations of anything in Nature.”

While elsewhere in London Florence Nightingale was writing about the healing power of beauty, 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.

Couple with these visualizations of consciousness by Margaret Watts Hughes’s contemporary Benjamin Betts (one of which became the cover of Figuring) and pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott’s visualizations of scientific phenomena, then revisit Hannah Fries’s poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song” — a tender love letter to the voice.

HT Public Domain Review via Sophie Blackall