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.

Eavesdropping Theory

I recall with great fondness various childhood instances of playing with cups and string to form a simple listening device. Such moments were full of excitement at discovering not only the possibility of mysteriously extending oneself through the taut cotton of a string, but also of listening in to another’s voice with such proximity. Holding the cup up to my ear to hear the whispers of a friend would trigger a profound sensation that coiled itself inside the ear like a voluptuous purr. The tickling of the ear would send a ripple of chills along the back of my neck, and produce an exquisite relation between myself and my friend. Such pleasures might be said to encapsulate the sensorial intensity of sound, aligning the auditory with a radical tactility, forming the other side to instances of extreme volume or pressurized vibrations that also incite bodily experience. The sonic tickle though elicits such subtle reactions as to make one acutely aware of the body’s potential for erotic sensuality – where listening becomes truly an invasive trespass (rather than an assault onto bodily limits)… The cup and string locate such sonic interventions onto the site of eavesdropping, where the pleasures of listening become that of hearing what is not especially spoken for one’s ears. Trespass here then goes two ways – one, toward a surveying of the audible field around oneself, and the other, the incorporation of what is overheard into the sensorial space of the body. Eavesdropping then is both a form of surveillance, a tactical infringement onto the private, and an erotic experience driven by the quivering of audition. Conscious act and sensorial experience, or social intrusion and psychic obsession. From here, eavesdropping may function as a mechanism for driving forms of sonic action and discourse by positioning the ear between the forces of the social field and that of bodily knowledge, making the tickle a means for production.