ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Removal of the Hand: Gesture, Metrology, and Music in Early Voice Acoustics

• In Event: Listen: Sound Science Across Time 2

English Abstract

Robert Willis’ vowel organ pipe is often seen as paradigmatic of a nineteenth-century shift from sound simulation instruments that replicate causes to those that replicate effects, or, as Jonathan Sterne memorably put it, from objects modelled on the mouth to those modelled on the ear (2003). I disrupt this narrative, arguing that Willis is a direct inheritor of an eighteenth-century tradition in which accurate acoustical modelling of vocal organ physiology was secondary to the production of convincing speech effects. His true departure was in assigning a fixed, measurable pitch for each vowel, expressed as pipe length and in musical letter notation. With further refinement, he hoped his apparatus would “[furnish] philologists with a correct measure for the shades of difference in the pronunciation of the vowels by different nations” (1830:243). In contrast to the gestural choreography required to make the older machines speak, Willis’ subtle regulation of his stopper made the pipes seem to speak for themselves. This curious entanglement of early speech acoustics with the history of metrology and music might be read not so much as the removal of the mouth, but the removal of the hand.

Author

• Cathy Lucas, UCL