This is the Sound
This is an audio essay about resonance, history, and uncertainty. I’ve included the text here for accessibility and reference, but for the best experience of this piece, listening with full attention (and ideally closed eyes) is preferable.
Guglielmo Marconi, who lived from 1874 to 1937, was a pioneer of long-distance radio transmission. A well-known public figure of his time, a man of ideas, Marconi was an enthusiastic and outspoken advocate for both wireless communication technology and fascism.
This is the sound of an idea: ▶
Toward the end of Marconi’s storied life, he came to believe that any sound, once set into motion, will perpetuate and reverberate forever. He thought all sounds of the past will continue to sound, if imperceptibly, as tiny ripples across the surface of the present and the future. Marconi dreamed that if he could build a microphone sensitive enough, it could capture for playback any sound from any time in the past.
I spent some time trying to track down statements or publications by Marconi in which he articulated this idea. Every source I checked either itself framed the story with an apocryphal phrase like "it is said that" or cited, as factual support, a source that did. But I have no real reason to believe that this story about Marconi's belief is untrue.
This is the sound of a belief: ▶
However true the story about Marconi is, the underlying idea, while evocative, is unsound. Sound waves are rippling disturbances in physical matter. Matter absorbs the waves’ energy and waves disperse broadly over time across more and more space. At a certain point, a wave's energy is no longer sufficient for minimal particle displacement and the sound disappears into a sea of ambient noise.
This is the sound of a server farm: ▶
Electromagnetic waves, on the other hand, do continue indefinitely. Radio signals from the earliest broadcasts are, at this moment, outwardly bound and over a hundred light years away.
This is the sound of radio: ▶
Sound waves may not perpetuate forever, but they do continue well past the point when they’re detectable by our ears. They persist, as increasingly minute inaudible atomic reverberations, for seconds or even minutes after we can no longer hear them.
I'd like to invite you now, and for the rest of this listening experience, to listen for those mostly imperceptible tails of reverberation that follow the perceptible end of each sound you hear: whether a word, a syllable, background noise in this recording or where you are, or in any of the recordings I’ve embedded in this recording.
Let's practice — this is the sound of a sound: ▶
Let’s practice one more time. Listen for the precise point where it fades into nothing. This is the sound of a sound: ▶
Sounds also persist, of course, in biological and in technological memory. This is the sound of a memory: ▶
Several sources I read claimed, without attribution, that Marconi's belief in endless reverberation emerged during a period of spiritual attunement between his fifth and sixth heart attack. According to these sources, Marconi died of a ninth heart attack, making him something of a proverbial cat.
However, Marconi's widow, Maria Marconi, wrote a memoir, which eventually appeared in English translation in 1999 as Marconi My Beloved. And in the book, she describes his death of a heart attack as a sudden, shocking, unexpected event. She does not mention any prior issues with his heart.
It's not clear to me whether she chose to omit what would have been a no doubt painful and frightening series of medical episodes, or if the sequence was a popular invention, maybe someone's offhand joke, that ended up reverberating culturally as a historical factoid.
Marconi's greatest achievement was, no doubt, the transmission of a wireless signal 2000 miles across the Atlantic. The signal was received by a kite in Newfoundland, connected to the ground by copper wire, which Marconi operated as a windborne receiver.
The signal transmitted was the Morse code letter "S". This is the sound of the Morse code letter "S": ▶
The first Morse code message ever sent, by Samuel Morse in 1844, was a biblical verse, a question. It was: "What hath God wrought?"
This is the sound of the beginning of that message. It is not a recording of the sound, but a reconstruction based on the telegraph's paper tape, which captured the sequence of symbols like a player piano roll. The message took Morse 45 seconds to type, so in the interest of time, this is just the first few letters: ▶
When the US Navy stopped using Morse Code in 1999, their final message was, again, "What hath God wrought?"
When the French Navy stopped using Morse Code in 1997, their final message was, according to many sources on the internet:
Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.
Or it was:
Appel à tous. Ceci est notre dernier cri, avant notre éternel silence.
Or it was:
Appel à tous. Ceci est notre dernier cri, avant notre silence éternel.
I asked my friend and translator Olivier Mathieu, which French version of the line sounded more plausible. His answer was neither: to his ear, they both sounded suspiciously like translations from English. Olivier found a Le Monde article from 1997 which contained, presumably, the actual text of the transmission, which was indeed mostly in English. This is that text, in part:
this is our final cry on 500 khz before eternal silence stop...
good bye from all at brest le conquet radio stop silent key for ever stop
My French isn't great. So I google translated the Le Monde article. The translation began:
IT IS ON A WINTER NIGHT, the last of this month of January, and on the wildest, the most sneaky, the most feared of the Atlantic coasts, that the funeral will be orchestrated in a mythical language, and obsolete, which, for almost a century, knew how to connect seafarers and landowners. His majesty the walrus is dying.
Morse, in French, *morse*, means "walrus." The machine-translated article continued:
Goodbye walrus! The sailors resigned themselves. Because radio, today, reigns supreme.
This is the sound of radio reigning supreme in 1941: ▶
This is the sound of the end, one of many ends around the world, of analog television, in 2009: ▶
This is the sound of history: ▶
In her memoir, Marconi's widow wrote that shortly before his death, Marconi discovered a method for turning seawater into gold. While they were traveling together aboard a ship, he brought out three jars of seawater to show her. All three appeared to contain sparkling golden metallic flakes. Before they reached the shore, the couple dismantled the equipment, dumped out the jars, to hide Marconi's discovery from others. Unfortunately, Marconi did not share his method with his wife before his fatal ninth, or first, heart attack.
This is the sound of seawater turning into gold: ▶
As we near the end of this essay, I want to take us back to Marconi’s alleged fascination with endless sonic reverberation. It is said that Marconi believed that with a powerful enough receiver, you could tune into and hear the Sermon on the Mount.
Based on the numerous unreliable sources I consulted, Marconi did not believe it was necessary to be near the Mount's original physical location to be able to listen back through time to the sermon. The sermon was, presumably, thought to have dispersed to the point where it could be receivable anywhere, everywhere. Even here, where I’m writing and recording this piece, and, there, where you’re receiving it.
And I want to hold here, and there, for a moment, and let the idea reverberate in the space between here and there: that, at any moment, at this moment, all of sonic history on Earth still reverberates, at undetectable levels, as the faintest possible atomic traces of waves passing through every point simultaneously. It's not true. But it is.
This is the sound of that reverberation: ▶