In 1885, Welsh singer Margaret Watts Hughes discovered that her voice could paint pictures. Singing into her "Eidophone"—a mouthpiece connected to a drum-like rubber membrane — she saw scattered seeds gather into precise geometric patterns. She soon replaced the seeds with colored pastes and, by pressing a glass plate against the membrane, fixed the fleeting shapes as permanent images: "daisies" whose petals unfurled at one pitch and withdrew at another, swirling galaxies of pigment, plant-like filaments that look like nothing ever seen on land or sea.
Hughes first built the instrument to measure vocal power, but the device became a camera for sound itself. Moving a smaller "hand Eidophone" across wet pigment while sustaining a single note left grooves, dots and bursts whose every ridge recorded the exact vibration of her voice. Instead of playing the trace back, she let it stand as a silent picture—one that visitors to her Islington orphanage saw glowing in the windows, lit from behind like stained glass.
For Hughes the images were devotional: experiments that might reveal "another link in the great chain of the organised universe that… took its shape in the voice of God." What astonishes now is that these botanical-seeming forms, so precise yet unearthly, were conjured only by voice and vibration.
Illustration of the Photophone's transmitter, from El mundo físico (1882) by Amédée Guillemin
See also: 'Happenstantial Art' captures the beauty and artistry in everyday life
