It seems suitable, for April Fools’ Day, to note that Language Log has an interesting survey of the dubious science of ‘paleoacoustics’. This being the idea that ancient sound energy can be embedded in, and recovered from, certain types of resonant objects that were created under certain conditions.
For instance, the sound of an ancient potter singing a tune as he turned his clay pot on the wheel, recovered by ‘playing’ the baked pot as if it were an old L.P. vinyl record.
The Language Log post references Woodbridge’s curious “Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity” (1969), which is free at the link and is otherwise paywalled deep in the Proceedings of the IEEE journal.
Lovecraft also uncovered a similar real-life folk-loric belief around ‘imprinting’ in window glass, which he heard via Mrs. Miniter in 1923…
“Mrs. Miniter supplied many [Wilbraham] legends and particulars which no guidebook could furnish — it was on this occasion [1923] that I first heard of the rustic superstition which asserts that window-panes slowly absorb and retain the likeness of those who habitually sit by them, year after year.” — H.P. Lovecraft, writing of a 1923 visit to Mrs. Miniter.
That wasn’t embedded sound, of course, but a similar idea.
The ‘paleoacoustic’ notion appears to have a modern parallel, in the discussions around the ‘personality traces’ that build up through our everyday use of new media. These can be recovered and partially re-assembled, by the right algorithm. There is even a sort of ‘modern witchcraft’ belief currently fashionable, that these traces are evidence of an ineradicable stain on the personality of those who made them. For instance when a jokey bantering message shared among 15-year-old friends is dredged out of social media 20 years later, to be touted as ‘proof’ that the sender must still be a horrible person today. ‘Archaeoacoustics’ also has a certain parallel with the way that certain new media space may be ‘tuned’ to be resonant with and amplify certain aspects of the human personality. One can see that, for example, in the current claims that Twitter is ‘tuned’ to knee-jerk outrage fuelled by tiny dopamine hits, and thus actually produces a mob of junkies addicted to being outraged. Or the belief that slick commercial websites are using what are called ‘dark patterns’, to make tired and rushed Internet users click on buttons accepting things we don’t want (such as Amazon Prime, which does happen).
‘Paleoacoustic’ ideas on embedded ancient sound also intersect with the wider architectural arcana on the ‘archaeoacoustic’ methods of sustaining uncanny acoustics in a space. I’m certainly no expert on such matters but I know that this (the study of the use of known acoustical properties to enhance the experience of sacred sites) is usually grudgingly accepted as respectable by academics. Except where it strays into fringe ideas, such as the 1970s notion that resonant stone circles were ‘ancient orgone energy accumulators’, ‘ley-line reflectors’, or that ‘ghosts’ as manifested forms of certain particular types of acoustics in the surrounding architecture. That’s getting back toward the folk-loric notion that certain traces of a spirit can be ‘trapped’ in places, mirrors or window frames. Lovecraft and Whitehead’s story “The Trap” comes closest here, although the story does not explicitly make sonics part of the plot. The mirror does hold a voice, it’s true, but it inhibits sounds and leads to the difficulties in hearing… “the struggling speaker in my dream”.
Last time I looked, the moderately respectable ‘archaeoacoustics’ studied the resonant possibility in a sacred site. A sonic latency that can be temporarily activated by human activity. Such as humming, voice-throwing, Old Irish-style keening, monastic chant-song, choirs, organ pipes, flutes, with the built or human-enlarged structure ‘tuned’ to them in some way. Or with the sonics enhanced for ancient sites by natural phenomena, such as wind blowing through a narrow opening or over the ends of smooth tubes, gas-venting caused by decaying vegetation in a underground river (Wetton Mill and Gawain); a rising sea-tide in caves below; natural thermal contraction and expansion; thunder; natural echoes. In this case the sounds themselves are not ‘recorded’ into the fabric of the structure in a re-playable manner, but are instead fleeting and performative (if perhaps somewhat predictable in time, re: wind and water and atmospherics conducive to echoes).
Some Lovecraftians may see a similarity here with the ‘angles’ found in Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”. Or perhaps even the strange precipitous Rue d’Auseil in “Erich Zann” (Dec 1921), whose masonry seems entirely dedicated to lifting the street up toward the single gable window that offers a small sonic platform to ‘beyond’.[1] But Lovecraft offers us not only a possible accumulator or focus-point-in-architecture but also the diffuse aether-sound that might be thus accumulated. He posits an infinitely attenuated diffuse rather than localised sound, sound at “the very brink of audibility”, overflowing into our dimension or time. Such as is in “The Hound”, and later in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933)…
“the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds — perhaps from regions beyond life — trembling on the very brink of audibility.”
Whatever one thinks about ‘paleoacoustics’ and ‘archaeoacoustics’, the inspiration they once gave to spiritual artisans may now make them actually replicable and realisable with new technologies. With new ‘smart’ materials, new architectural methods, new media and cheap sensors. In nanotechnology and ‘smart skins’, for instance, we may eventually have the tools to realise the fanciful April Fools’ Day notion of embedded ‘paleoacoustics’ in very fabric of tangible objects. Something that was tentatively named in a recent paper as “Tassophonics: nanotechnology as the magical unknown“…
“The goal is to assess if the introduction of nanotechnology as a ‘magical unknown’ can be used to seed and affect our relationships to objects and archived memories.”
In the meantime ‘paleoacoustics’, ‘archaeoacoustics’ and ‘tassophonics’ all appear to offer interesting ideas for imaginative and future-focussed writers, and (so far as I can tell) it’s been very much under-explored so far. Admittedly, I’m not that familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos beyond Lovecraft, but I don’t recall reading about such plot devices in Joshi’s Rise and Fall survey of the sub-genre.
1. [↑] One might expect the steeple and bell-tower in “Haunter” to elicit some evocation of sonics, but these are consistently muffled and indistinct (“dull fumbling sounds inside the black tower” etc) until one “earsplitting crash of sound” which a few paragraphs later is linked with the strange death of Blake.
