Fugitive Melodies

“Can one hope that the day is near when the musical phrase, escaped from the singer’s lips, will be written by itself and as if without the musician’s knowledge on a docile paper and leave an imperishable trace of those fugitive melodies which the memory no longer finds when it seeks them?”

These words by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville from 1857 were written while the bibliographer sought out technical means for documenting the movements of sound. His phonautographic inventions eventually opened up the way for audio reproduction, originally by sparking the imagination to consider the impressions left by sound, as material movements that may function in turn as a script, as a text for future deciphering. Only recently have Scott’s original experiments, left at the Academy of Sciences in Paris since that time, been recreated back into sound, allowing the very first audio recordings to find amplification – with the mysterious sounds of “Au Clair de la Lune” speaking through layers of crackle and hiss. As if frozen in time, the early recording acts as a return of not only a forgotten scientific invention, but of a single body and its voice. Who was this singing in 1860? Was it Scott himself, during an afternoon lunch break inspired by the sudden lull in the day? The voice is there, as a legible scribble on a membrane of paper – a mark that nonetheless says nothing of the embodied origin, the personality, the mouth and lips that give us these words, these melodies. It is a secret ensconced in the texture of the paper, along the threaded movement of the soundwave. The “fugitive melody” then is also a kind of secret agent operating through science and the apparatus’ of reproduction to circulate through the channels of communication and audition.