The Classical works that laid the foundations of acoustics, including Ptolemy’s Harmonics, were based on Pythagorean ideas that emphasised the mathematics of harmony, and consideration of sound phenomena tended to be overlaid by musical theory in both science and literature until the seventeenth century. Attention was also paid to various kinds of natural sounds, especially those associated with the weather and the spontaneous sounds associated with particular emotions, including cries of pain and triumph, moans, groans, and sobs. Outside of music and alarms, the most significant artificial sounds prior to the nineteenth century were the loud bangs associated with explosions, whose clamour increased markedly from the fourteenth century onwards. Literary works frequently draw analogies between these various categories of sound, often extrapolating the ‘‘pathetic fallacy’’ of meteorological representation.
Although the Pythagoreans knew that the pitch of a musical note produced by a plucked string depends on the length of the string, it was left to the Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio to propose a vibrational theory of sound in the first century b.c., and it was largely disregarded thereafter. Pierre Gassendi made the first recorded measurements of the velocity of sound in 1635, but Marin Mersenne and Isaac Newton were the chief advocates of the notion that sound was a vibration of the air. A general mathematical formula for wave propagation was proposed by Jean d’Alembert in 1747, assisting the understanding of the different kinds of vibrations produced by various musical instruments, although a comprehensive analysis of sound had to await the mathematical tools provided by Joseph Fourier in the early nineteenth century. The modern science of acoustics is based on Georg Simon Ohm’s 1843 hypothesis that the ear analyses complex sounds into simple tones in a way that can be represented mathematically by Fourier analysis.
There was little in this sequence of theoretical developments to inspire literary works that would bring acoustics phenomena into the foreground, but the possibilities imaginable in the Renaissance are neatly summarised in the account of the ‘‘SoundHouses’’ in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), which refers to amplifying devices for use as hearing aids, artificial echoes that modified the pitch of sounds and various means of transmitting sounds through ‘‘trunks and pipes’’. The usefulness of information learned by eavesdropping as a plot lever encouraged the occasional use in fiction of ‘‘whispering galleries’’, like the one in St. Paul’s Cathedral, that bring sound waves into focus some distance from their source; the effect is speculatively extrapolated in Lucretia P. Hale’s ‘‘The Spider’s Eye’’ (1856).
The development of the electric telegraph in the 1830s, and its adaptation to transmit messages in sound by means of Morse code, was a dramatic stimulus to the literary imagination. The tapping out of messages in Morse code became a standard feature of melodramatic crime fiction in the latter half of the century. Leeon Scott’s phonautograph (1857) could not play back the sounds it traced, so Thomas Edison’s phonograph (1877) represented a prodigious advance. The method of recording by cutting a groove in wax, developed in 1885, increased its convenience. Emile Berliner’s gramophone system was more convenient still when it went into mass production after 1900. Early fictional representations of sound recording include J. D. Whelpley’s ‘‘The Atoms of Chladni’’ (1860) and Florence McLandburgh’s ‘‘The Automaton Ear’’ (1873), while Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘‘The Voice of Silence’’ (1891) set an early precedent for countless twentieth-century accounts of the phonographic capture of unwary confessions. The development of the telephone had an even more dramatic effect on the strategies of popular fiction, and the development of radio continued the process of transformation.
Twentieth-century progress in the refinement of sound-recording technology was swift. Tales of espionage found abundant melodramatic opportunities in keeping abreast or slightly ahead of the sequence of advances, and a rich mythology of ‘‘bugging’’ developed as eavesdropping became an art form, and ‘‘wearing a wire’’ became a key instrument of fictitious police procedure. As coding techniques for concealing information in auditory signals increased in sophistication, the literary spinoff of the science of cryptography became correspondingly complex. The speculative dimension of such fiction was amply displayed in technothrillers. Godwin Walsh’s The Voice of the Murderer (1926), which features an ultrasensitive microphone designed to capture residual sounds from the past, illustrates the smallness of the imaginative step required to overreach the boundary of rational plausibility.
Just as the human eye is only sensitive to a limited range of electromagnetic emissions that constitute visible light, the human ear only experiences a limited range of vibrations as sound—usually between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second. Some animals can perceive vibrations outside of this range, but hearing is not nearly as widespread a sense as sight, being found in only two major groups: arthropods and vertebrates. Some representatives of both groups are sensitive to supersonic or ultrasonic vibrations that the human ear cannot perceive. The heroes of E. E. Smith’s Triplanetary (1934; rev. book 1948) have difficulty communicating with an amphibian race because of different ranges of aural sensitivity—a problem reproduced in actuality when humans began trying to communicate with dolphins in the 1960s. Sounds outside the range of human hearing are employed in various ingenious ways in L. Sprague de Camp’s ‘‘Ultrasonic God’’ (1951; aka ‘‘The Galton Whistle’’), Lloyd Biggle Jr.’s ‘‘Silence Is Deadly’’ (1957), and James E. Gunn’s ‘‘Deadly Silence’’ (1958). J. B. Priestley’s comedy Low Notes on a High Level (1954) features a device that emits the lowest possible notes.
As the titles of some of these stories imply, it is often the absence rather than the presence of sound that seems significant; it was the fact that the dog did not bark that put Sherlock Holmes on the right track in Conan Doyle’s ‘‘Silver Blaze’’ (1892). The calculated suppression or obliteration of sound is the subject matter of such stories as A. M. McNeill’s ‘‘The Noise Killer’’ (1930), Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘‘Silence Please’’ (1954), T. L. Sherred’s ‘‘Cue for Quiet’’ (1953), J. G. Ballard’s ‘‘The Sound Sweep’’(1960), and Christopher Anvil’s ‘‘Gadget vs. Trend’’ (1962). On the other hand, the fact that sound cannot be transmitted through a vacuum is routinely ignored by the manufacturers of sound effects in science fiction cinema and TV shows, where battles in space are often impossibly loud. The plausibility of such auditory imagery is not merely a careless reflection of the noise of earthly battles; one acoustic phenomenon that acquired iconic status in the twentieth century was the ‘‘sonic boom’’ associated with ‘‘breaking the sound barrier’’—a feat first achieved by the rocketengined Bell X-1 in 1947. Although jet fighters routinely operated at speeds above the charismatically named Mach-1 after 1960, the association of very high speeds with acoustic phenomena, sealed in the early days of space exploration, continued to exercise a certain imaginative authority long thereafter. Allen Adler’s Mach 1: A Story of Planet Ionus (1957) features a supersonic sea-sled.
Unmusical variants of the seductive song of the sirens are featured in A. E. van Vogt’s ‘‘The Sound’’ (1950) and Jack Vance’s ‘‘Noise’’ (1952). Alien acoustics—which cause sounds that are perceived as identical by one species to seem very different to another— cause trouble in translation in H. Beam Piper’s ‘‘Naudsonce’’ (1962). New acoustic technology enables the use of music as weapon in Christopher Hodder-Williams’ 98.4 (1969), Colin Cooper’s Dargason (1977), and Paul H. Cook’s Tintagel (1981). Disturbing ultrasonics are produced by a ‘‘saser’’ in Isaac Asimov’s ‘‘The Dim Rumble’’ (1982), and an ingenious means of committing murder by means of an acoustic phenomenon is featured in Laurence M. Janifer’s ‘‘The Dead Beat’’ (1997). The similarity of the grooves made on rotating cylinders by Edison’s first phonograph to grooves made on certain kinds of pots turned on wheels encouraged some archaeologists to wonder whether accidental sound recording might have been achieved in the distant past; Larry Eisenberg’s ‘‘Duckworth and the Sound Probe’’ (1971) and Gregory Benford’s ‘‘Time Shards’’ (1979) develop the thesis ironically.
The analogy between light and sound led to the development of the concept of ‘‘white noise’’, comprising a mixture of all audible frequencies. It was easy to produce, but seemed to have no function until it was deployed in sensory deprivation experiments to blank out other auditory stimuli—to which the ear becomes hypersensitive after exposure to silence. The mind’s tendency to search for significance in randomness—also associated with radio ‘‘static’’ and the malady of tinnitus—can lend a sinister quality to such phenomena, as explored and extrapolated in such works as Eando Binder’s ‘‘Static’’ (1936) and the movie White Noise (2005).
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