Bell's assistant Thomas Watson "wrote of the art of telephony and was a spiritualist who conjured ghosts at nightly seances in Salem. He was, for a time, a strong medium" (192). Watson would also seem to be the telecommunication era's first "noisician" when Ronell (1989) suggests that "Watson may have been, as he here asserts, the first person to listen to noise" (p. 259). Ronell praises Watson for having "an ear for the silence that the telephone was capable of speaking" and preserving "asiginificatory signals, planetary talk, and supersonic crackles, rather than rushing in a supply of semantic cover. This," Ronell continues, "possibly imparts a more radical accomplishment than the invention whose conception he shared" (p. 259). Here, as Ronell folds Watson's testimony into The Telephone Book, she alters the font of the text, rendering a snapshot of the soundwaves rippling through the lost book of rhythm and across Watson's writing:
This early silence in a telephone circuit gave me an opportunity for listening to stray electric currents that cannot be easily had to-day. 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. (p. 258-259)
Watson's passion for anharmonics places him in the same rhetorical tradition as Socrates, who, at an impasse between discoursing on love and discoursing on writing, outside the gates of Athens, asked Phaedrus to listen to the cicadas. !is what Socrates did in the Phaedrus: he talked over a chorus track of repetitious insects:
"Listen to me, then, in silence; for surely the place is holy;
so that you must not wonder, if, as I proceed,
I appear to be in a divine fury,
for already I am getting into dithyrambics"
glide on back to Tone Rings
ShareRiff
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.