“Earth Sound Earth Signal is a mind-expanding, ear-opening book,at once a history of electromagnetism in the arts and a provocation torethink the relationship between media and nature. With erudition andwit, Kahn tells the stories of artists, scientists, and engineers whohave made audible the way our planet buzzes, crackles, hums, andwhistles, from the ionosphere to the deepest depths of the oceans. Theresult is a strikingly original work about sound, aesthetics, politics,and the envinronment, from Henry David Thoreau to the Cold War to theage of global warming. It will haunt you–in a good way–long after youread it.” –David Suisman, author of Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music

“Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal delivers a dazzlingly innovative study of how avant-garde music and art have made the planet itself audible over the last 200 years: the soil,the air, the atmosphere, electromagnetic radiation, and wirelesscommunications become objects of playful scientific inquiry andaesthetic enjoyment in works from Henry David Thoreau to Alvin Lucier,John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Barry, and Joyce Hinterding. Earth Sound Earth Signal unfolds new histories of communication, of technology, of science, and ofexperimental aesthetics in a unique fusion of sharp-eyed scholarshipwith manifesto-style punch lines. At stake is not just aesthetics orhistory, but a new idea of planetary nature: Earth perceived throughglobal and local waves, radiations, and energy flows that humans cannnot see but that become audible through media from rocks and winds toelectronic circuitry. At a time when older notions of nature no longergrasp the new global technonatures and biocultures of the twenty-firstcentury, Kahn’s brilliantly insightful manifesto of ‘Aelectrosonics’makes nature resonate anew in an entirely different key and at adifferent scale: It shows how Earth sings and the atmosphere makesmusic. This planetary techno-music is a must-hear for anyone interestedin experimental aesthetics, environmentalism, or globalization.” –Ursula K. Heise, author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

“It is rare that the history of the arts and techno-sciences are sosuccessfully blended as in Douglas Kahn’s magisterial survey of how theperception of natural electromagnetic phenomena entered the scientific,artistic and popular imagination. Kahn documents the inquiries of Thomas Watson, Thoreau, scientists and amateurs in the 19th and 20th centuries and moves on to Alvin Lucier, John Cage and contemporary composers andscientific inquiry. This is a fundamental text for all collaborationsbetween the arts and sciences today.” –Roger Malina, Professor of Artand Technology and Professor Of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas

“A fascinating tour through previously untold episodes in media artshistory. From its theoretical moves to ‘think energy’ and attend to itslively presence in communications and the arts, to its fresh historicaldetail on experimental works by artists such as Alvin Lucier and Pauline Oliveros, Earth Sound Earth Signal should appeal broadly to scholars,artists, and enthusiasts of media and sound.” –Tara Rodgers, composerand author of Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound

“Douglas Kahn is one of the most inspiring scholars dealing with sound and art. He’s able to accurately track historically compelling behind-the-scenes facts, while retrieving and connecting visionary trajectories across aesthetics and (especially) scientific domains. This long awaited book is an excellent collection of author’s writings and is truly interdisciplinary, ranging equally proficiently over science, telecommunications history, sound and art…. The significance of experiments undertaken during the period from the end of 19th century until now, compose a detailed and extensively explored picture of primal forces coded and decoded as data and meaning carriers (in a way they are “media”), making this book another unmissable text in sound art research.” –Alessandro Ludovico, Neural Magazine

“In Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, the premise is holistic. Signals are everywhere, running through us, the earth, the sky, bouncing off the ionosphere, and the best way to tune into them is by listening. By the time you’ve finished reading this book you feel like you’ve tapped into a magnificent universal circuit. It’s almost religious… The book offers vast amounts of fascinating information ranging from background stories around the creation of artworks to mythic descriptions of natural phenomena, such as auroras and static storms at high altitude, which are utterly enthralling. However the dominant achievement is that Kahn manages to rough-up the binary of nature and technology. As he extrapolates on his theory of the Aelectrosonic–the sounds of the electromagnetic world–he repositions nature at the centre of electronic music and indeed of media arts. It all starts with the signals that have been waiting for us to invent ways to hear them… Most of all, the book offers a comprehensive and mind-altering understanding of the connectedness between ourselves, the Earth and all of these shimmering energetic properties. Douglas Kahn invites us to tune in to this awesome totality.” –Gail Priest, RealTime

“Earth Sound Earth Signal is a phenomenal book… It reorients sound studies by attending to phenomena that have been marginalized within the discussion – the glitches and glissandi deemed ‘noise’ by a history that has largely been written from the perspective of audio technologies intended for sonic reproduction and high fidelity auditory experience. In taking up earth’s sounds and signals, it rewrites existing tendencies and assumptions about technology, nature, and culture, and their respective boundaries, undoing binaries and commonly held meanings. And by the end it makes it all seem obvious: that radio is nature, that bodies are technological, and that the noise of technology might be musical. Just as earth sounds and signals are existing phenomena that telephonic technologies brought into the realm of human perception, the book makes us aware of things encountered but not formulated, leaving us with a resounding feeling of the inevitability of it all. This is achieved through an impressive scale of research that brings together wide-ranging fields of inquiry, stitched together with a deft analysis that treats the material – physical, energetic, auditory, aesthetic – as historically situated.” –Marina Peterson, author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles

“Earth Sound Earth Signal is a mind-expanding, ear-opening book, at once a history of electromagnetism in the arts and a provocation to rethink the relationship between media and nature. With erudition and wit, Kahn tells the stories of artists, scientists, and engineers who have made audible the way our planet buzzes, crackles, hums, and whistles, from the ionosphere to the deepest depths of the oceans. The result is a strikingly original work about sound, aesthetics, politics, and the environment, from Henry David Thoreau to the Cold War to the age of global warming. It will haunt you—in a good way—long after you read it.” —David Suisman, author of Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music

“Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal delivers a dazzlingly innovative study of how avant-garde music and art have made the planet itself audible over the last 200 years: the soil, the air, the atmosphere, electromagnetic radiation, and wireless communications become objects of playful scientific inquiry and aesthetic enjoyment in works from Henry David Thoreau to Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Barry, and Joyce Hinterding. Earth Sound Earth Signal unfolds new histories of communication, of technology, of science, and of experimental aesthetics in a unique fusion of sharp-eyed scholarship with manifesto-style punch lines. At stake is not just aesthetics or history, but a new idea of planetary nature: Earth perceived through global and local waves, radiations, and energy flows that humans cannnot see but that become audible through media from rocks and winds to electronic circuitry. At a time when older notions of nature no longer grasp the new global technonatures and biocultures of the twenty-first century, Kahn’s brilliantly insightful manifesto of ‘Aelectrosonics’ makes nature resonate anew in an entirely different key and at a different scale: It shows how Earth sings and the atmosphere makes music. This planetary techno-music is a must-hear for anyone interested in experimental aesthetics, environmentalism, or globalization.” —Ursula K. Heise, author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

“It is rare that the history of the arts and techno-sciences are so successfully blended as in Douglas Kahn’s magisterial survey of how the perception of natural electromagnetic phenomena entered the scientific, artistic and popular imagination. Kahn documents the inquiries of Thomas Watson, Thoreau, scientists and amateurs in the 19th and 20th centuries and moves on to Alvin Lucier, John Cage and contemporary composers and scientific inquiry. This is a fundamental text for all collaborations between the arts and sciences today.” —Roger Malina, Professor of Art and Technology and Professor Of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas

“A fascinating tour through previously untold episodes in media arts history. From its theoretical moves to ‘think energy’ and attend to its lively presence in communications and the arts, to its fresh historical detail on experimental works by artists such as Alvin Lucier and Pauline Oliveros, Earth Sound Earth Signal should appeal broadly to scholars, artists, and enthusiasts of media and sound.” —Tara Rodgers, composer and author of Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is author or editor of several books, including Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts and, most recently, Source: Music of the Avant-Garde and Mainframe Experimentalism.

Earth Sound Earth Signal

Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts

By Douglas Kahn

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25755-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii,
Acknowledgments, ix,
Introduction, 1,
1. Thomas Watson: Natural Radio, Natural Theology, 25,
2. Microphonic Imagination, 34,
3. The Aeolian and Henry David Thoreau’s Sphere Music, 41,
4. The Aelectrosonic and Energetic Environments, 53,
5. Inductive Radio and Whistling Currents, 69,
6. Alvin Lucier: Brainwaves, 83,
7. Edmond Dewan and Cybernetic Hi-Fi, 93,
8. Alvin Lucier: Whistlers, 106,
9. From Brainwaves to Outer Space: John Cage and Karl Jansky, 115,
10. For More New Signals, 122,
11. Sound of the Underground: Earthquakes, Nuclear Weaponry, and Music, 133,
12. Long Sounds and Transperception, 162,
13. Pauline Oliveros: Sonosphere, 174,
14. Thomas Ashcraft: Electroreceptor, 187,
15. Black Sun, Black Rain, 193,
16. Star-Studded Cinema, 205,
17. Robert Barry: Conceptualism and Energy, 218,
18. Collaborating Objects Radiating Environments, 227,
19. Joyce Hinterding: Drawing Energy, 237,
20. Earth-in-Circuit, 255,
Notes, 259,
Index, 317,

CHAPTER 1

Thomas Watson

Natural Radio, Natural Theology

The legend of radio begins in the 1890s with Guglielmo Marconi leading the procession of successful great men and Nikola Tesla among the great men unfairly treated. Although some would win in the courts of law and aficionado opinion, Marconi held sway in the popular imagination. Marconi’s early device was actually wireless telegraphy, not “radio” as it came to be known with commercial broadcast in the 1920s. It did not transmit voice, music, and other sounds, only the make-and-break dots-and-dashes of telegraphic code. Purpose-built inventions that carried voice and music appeared around 1906 to 1910 and were linked to the names of Reginald Fessenden, Lee De Forest, and Marconi himself, among others, although, as we shall see, non-purpose-built devices had wirelessly carried voice and music through “inductive radio” three decades earlier.

Understanding the physical basis of electromagnetic waves is attributed to James Clerk Maxwell, who, continuing the work of Michael Faraday, theorized electromagnetic waves in 1864, and to Heinrich Hertz, who, two decades later, empirically demonstrated their existence. Still, as Charles Süsskind has stated, “Observations of electromagnetic-wave propagation from man-made electrical disturbances have been made probably for as long as there have been means for producing moderately large sparks.” One such observation occurred in 1780 when “Luigi Galvani observed that sparking from an electro static generator could cause convulsions in a dead frog at some distance from the machine.”

What kept radio from being heard on the tail end of sparks, apart from the wet slap of a dead frog? Historical incidents of transmissions or possible transmissions are studied in the niche topic of “pre-Marconi wireless.” They fall into two general classes: the first contains examples of induction, the disturbances of electromagnetic fields known to Hans Christian Ørsted and Michael Faraday; and the second contains likely examples of transmitted electromagnetic waves associated with Maxwell and Hertz. The principles of induction were understood in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, so when people were confronted with inexplicable incidents of transmission prior to Marconi, such incidents were simply dismissed as being nothing more than forms of induction.

When the telephone came along in 1876, its lines interacted with the electromagnetic fields of telegraph and telephone lines and “earth currents” and received naturally occurring electromagnetic waves. That is, the telephone acted as a wireless device in both senses of induction and the reception of transmission. Those listening certainly knew what Morse code, music, and voices sounded like, so when they heard them when no one was sending them from the other end of the telephone, they knew they had unexpected company from other lines. In this way, Morse code was heard without wires when Marconi was a toddler, and voices and music were heard when Fessenden was ten years old. However, unlike Morse code, when people listening on the telephone heard natural radio they could not know what it was, so its sounds were a matter of mystery and speculation.

In 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his “articulating” telephone, there were already a number of telephones in existence. They worked on the “make-and-break” currents of the telegraph, an appropriate term given the commercial viability of communications systems, and some telephones were designed to transmit fixed musical pitches. Bell’s device, on the other hand, used “undulatory” currents conducive to the dynamics of the voice, as well as to a greater range of musical sounds. However, if a telephone was attached to a telegraph or telephone line, sounds were heard before anyone started speaking or performing. Some were associated with the device itself, that is, with the complete grounded circuit of two or more telephones connected by a line. Some were sounds produced by currents that had long been known to exist more crudely on the telegraph. Other sounds were the result of interactions of inductive fields from nearby lines, and still others resulted from the fact that the line seconded as an antenna. Bell spoke about these sounds during the first few years of the telephone:

When a telephone is placed in circuit with a telegraph line, the telephone is found seemingly to emit sounds on its own account. The most extraordinary noises are often produced, the causes of which are at present very obscure. One class of sounds is produced by the inductive influence of neighboring wires and by leakage from them, the signals of the Morse alphabet passing over neighboring wires being audible in the telephone; and another class can be traced to earth currents upon the wire, a curious modification of this sound revealing the presence of defective joints in the wire.

The role of the telephone in the history of wireless technology has not gone unnoticed, but the last full treatment was in 1899. John Joseph Fahie’s book A History of Wireless Telegraphy: 1838–1899 was written a few years after Marconi’s invention, yet it required over three hundred pages to detail the many claims, attempts, and realizations at sending messages over distances without wires or, as it was known then, space telegraphy. Fahie divided the history into periods in the evolution of the technology, the first being characterized by good ideas and unsubstantiated claims, followed by the second, practicable period, which occurred once the telephone was attached to telephone and telegraph lines. Fahie, however, overlooked Thomas Watson, the person who first attached a telephone to a telephone line.

Alexander Graham Bell and Watson, his assistant and chief machinist, were the first to “talk by telegraph” because of their unique access to the device. Once Watson’s workday came to a close and no one was on the other end of the line, he listened to sounds other than voices. Environmental energies had long been ever-present in the telegraph system, but the transductive capability of the telephone made them audible as never before. The sensitivity of the device that made it possible to hear voices also made it possible for Watson to hear natural radio.

Watson heard radio once the telephone was hooked up to an outdoor telephone test line because the line acted as an unwitting long-wave antenna. The other lines coursing through Boston were telegraphic and there were no widespread sources of electrical interference. Most telegraphers closed shop at the end of the business day, meaning there was even less interference during the night when Watson listened to the sounds on his line. Writing in his autobiography fifty years after the fact, Watson reminisced:

At this time, early in 1876, there was but one outdoor telephone line in the world. It was the iron wire about half a mile long, grounded at each end, that connected the Exeter Place laboratory with Williams’ shop [in Boston]. This No. 12 galvanized wire was run for us by some of Williams’ men over the housetops very soon after work in the new laboratory was started. There were no trolley car or electric light systems to send their rattling current-noises into our wire and the only other electric circuits in constant use were the telegraph wires, the currents in which, being comparatively weak and easily recognized as the dots and dashes of the Morse code, did not trouble us. This early silence in a telephone circuit gave an opportunity for listening to stray electric currents that cannot easily be had today….

A few years later these delicate sounds could no longer be heard, for they were completely drowned out when electric light and power dynamos began to operate. I used to spend hours at night in the laboratory listening to the many strange noises in the telephone and speculating as to their cause. One of the most common sounds was a snap, followed by a grating sound that lasted two or three seconds before it faded into silence, and another was like the chirping of a bird.

What Watson described as “a snap, followed by a grating sound that lasted two or three seconds,” was probably a lightning strike followed by a “hissy” or “swishy” whistler, rather than a pure tone whistler and, in any case, the duration was probably overestimated. The bird chirping was probably a so-called tweek caused by the electromagnetic burst of a lightning strike, its energies stretched out over hundreds of kilometers bouncing between the earth’s surface and ionosphere into a short sliding tone. If it sounded like a flock of birds chirping, then it could have been a dawn chorus or, less likely, an auroral chorus, the former associated with the sunrise and the latter with auroral activity. The aurora borealis was not commonly observed with any strength at the lower latitudes of Boston; nevertheless there were numerous sightings listed in the monthly weather reports in the annual report of the United States chief signal-officer. Auroral display was but one form of “atmospheric electricity”; “meteorology” at the time was dedicated to anything that moved in the air and, in fact, also to when the ground moved with earthquakes and when plants budded and bloomed.

There would have been many possible times for Watson to hear natural radio associated with auroras, but he may have been referring to mid-1877. That was when William Channing reported that John Peirce, a professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and contributor to the early development of the telephone, saw the aurora and heard sounds in the telephone at the same time: “The sounds produced in the Bell telephone by the auroral flashes or streamers were observed here by Prof. John Peirce in May or June.” As the chief signal-officer’s report described for the month of May 1877, auroras “have been more numerous and brilliant, and more extensively observed, than for some years past,” with May 28 being especially notable. Many telegraph systems were affected by ground currents and “the electric disturbance on telegraph-wires was sufficient to interrupt ordinary business between New York, Buffalo, Baltimore, Montreal and Washington.” Since auroral display is associated with solar storms that, in turn, produce a flurry of natural radio phenomena, Watson may have been listening at a particularly good time. He was not only at the right place at the right time with respect to the invention of the telephone; he happened to start listening during a solar maximum conducive to natural radio.

That the iron test line could have acted as an antenna is supported by the sustained scientific observation that occurred twelve years later at the dramatically positioned Sonnblick Meteorological Observatory, a high-altitude (nearly 10,200 feet, or 3,300 meters) meteorological station in the Austrian Alps. The isolated peak was “connected with the post office by a long and free telephone line in a north-south direction,” rising 2 kilometers over a distance of 22 kilometers. The observatory was built in 1886 and “immediately after completion” of the telephone line, “Professor [Josef Maria] Pernter often observed a whistler of variable intensity in the line and Professor [Wilhelm] Trabert evaluated the observations” during a continuous six-year period from 1888 to 1894. Further proof of lines becoming antennas comes from a Bell Labs paper from 1933: “A twelve-mile telegraph line free from power interference has been found a satisfactory antenna, and with a telephone receiver between the line and the earth, swishes of remarkable clearness have been observed. Tweeks have been heard with the same equipment.”

Back in Boston in 1876, Watson had a few ideas about the source of what he heard: “My theory at the time was that the currents causing these sounds came from explosions on the sun or that they were signals from another planet. They were mystic enough to suggest the latter explanation but I never detected any regularity in them that might indicate they were intelligible signals. They were seldom loud enough to interfere with the use of the telephone on a short line.” Neither of these speculations was unreasonable for their time and, in any case, he was not committed to the task of identification. Watson’s speculation that the “sounds came from explosions on the sun” was well within the experience of telegraphers. Disturbances on the sun had been correlated to auroral displays, which had in turn been correlated to the magnetic storms that famously wreaked havoc on telegraphic transmissions.

This was probably on the mind of a journalist from the Lawrence American newspaper in Massachusetts who reported on a telephone lecture and demonstration that Bell and Watson conducted during May 1877. Although they failed to establish communications along the “rusty-jointed telegraph wires,” the article reported that at around 10:00 p.m. Watson had heard the loose electricity of the “Northern Lights and found his wires alive with lightning.” So, although Boston was too far south for all but exceptional auroral activity, the association was legitimate to an electrical mechanic like Watson in terms of sunspots, auroras, magnetic storms, and the conductivity of telegraph lines. Indeed, as we shall see, Alexander Graham Bell later marshaled his favorite invention, the photophone, to listen to the sounds of storms on the sun.

Any speculation that these might be signals from another planet was based on a confident lack of knowledge about the presence or absence of extraterrestrial life in the solar system. Given the new conversations happening because of the miraculous long-distance telecommunications capabilities earlier in the nineteenth century, reaching other creatures at far-flung locations was first of all a technical matter. Lunar life might be hailed using Charles Fourier’s sidereal telegraph, a large-scale version of the semaphore messaging that had worked well in systems of optical telegraphy, or it might be possible to communicate with Martians using powerful wireless signals as later suggested by Nikola Tesla. Indeed, during 1924 on the occasion of the close proximity of Mars to Earth, a National Radio Silence Day was proclaimed, with cooperation from military communications and corporate broadcasters, just in case any intelligent life-form might be transmitting.

Watson’s ruminations about what he heard on the telephone were not too dissimilar from those offered by W.H. Preece, the prominent engineer and chief technical officer of the British General Post Office, during a talk he gave in 1894 at the Wimbledon Literary and Scientific Society.

Strange, mysterious sounds are heard on all long telephone lines when the earth is used as a return, especially in the calm stillness of the night. Earth-currents are found in the telegraph circuits, and the aurora borealis lights up our northern sky when the sun’s photosphere is disturbed by spots. The sun’s surface must at times be violently disturbed by electrical storms, and as oscillations are set up and radiated through space, in sympathy with those required to affect telephones, it is not a wild dream to say that we may hear on this earth a “thunderstorm” in the sun….

If any of the planets be populated with beings like ourselves, having the gift of language and the knowledge to adapt the great forces of Nature to their wants, then, if they could oscillate immense stores of electrical energy to and fro, in telegraphic order, it would be possible for us to hold commune by telephone.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Earth Sound Earth Signal by Douglas Kahn. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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