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Voice is a garden: Margaret Watts Hughes's Victorian sound visualizations

“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 puzzli…

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. (Portrait by S. Harris courtesy of Merthyr Tydfil Leisure Trust)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. 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.

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