ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Viscous Signals: Paint, Paper Tools, and the Science of Graphic Sound in Postwar Britain

• In Event: When Scientific Images Go Rogue: Popularization, Pluralization, and Contestation

English Abstract

This talk traces hand-painted sounds in midcentury Britain as they moved through signal processing, linguistics and electronic music. Drawing on the National Museum of Scotland archives, it begins with the Parametric Artificial Talker, or PAT. Developed around 1949, PAT tested theories of speech compression by reducing speech to a few hand-drawn parameters. In the early 1950s, PAT was reworked into tool of experimental linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. The story concludes with electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram, who adapted these techniques to turn graphic marks into music starting around 1957. Each system operated like an analog computer, but instead of computing they translated hand-painted graphic marks into audible sound. The talk follows two lines of analysis. First, it reconstructs the technical lineage from PAT to Oramics, tracing how hand-painted control tracks moved from laboratory to studio. Second, it treats paint itself as evidence, attending to viscosity, adhesion and imprecision to challenge histories of paper tools that treat inscriptions as disembodied traces. By reading the shifting rhetoric around these machines, it shows how engineers, linguists and musicians reframed the material act of painting to suit their aims. Taken together, it argues that histories of computing must account for the situated labor that underpinned early digital experimentation. By following paint across laboratory and studio, I show how practices travel between communities and media, and how writing their histories in the plural can unsettle tidy stories of progress.

Author

• Benjamin Lindquist, MIT