Friday 12 July 2024 - Sunday 26 January 2025
10:00 am - 4:30 pm
Forms produced by the vibrations of human voice.
Heather Phillipson has selected these works by Margaret (Megan) Watts Hughes (1842 – 1907). These rarely seen works on glass are the result of Watts Hughes’ desire to test the different intensities of tone in the human voice.
Born in Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil, Margaret attracted considerable attention as a singer in her childhood. In 1864, she became student at the Royal Academy of Music. Awarded a King’s Scholarship, she possessed a remarkable voice and musical talent.
Through her early research into sound, Watts Hughes was introduced to the work of Ernst Chladni. Chladni had discovered that if the bow of a violin was drawn across the edges of a plate strewn with powder, the vibrations caused forms to appear in the powder. In 1885, Margaret invented a device (the Eidophone) that captured her voice by imprinting it on glass. The instrument consisted of a tube, a receiver, and a membrane that was stretched across the receiver.
Using paste spread over the membrane, she found that using different notes of various pitch and strength through the Eidophone would in turn create different shapes, as too would the degree of consistency in material and quantity of colour paste used.
These works are on loan from Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery
This display is part of Heather Phillipson’s Out of this World exhibition.
‘The study of sound had a fascination for her. She seemed to live in a world of sound. For her there was music in the wind, the rustling of the leaves, the ripple of the water, the rain, thunder, and even, the vehicular traffic of the street seemed to convey music to her soul.’
Extract from The Merthyr Express, 9 April 1910
“I have gone on singing into shape these peculiar forms, and stepping out of doors, have seen their parallels living in the flowers, ferns, and trees around me; and, again, as I have watched the little heaps in the formation of the floral figures gather themselves up and then shoot out their petals, just as a flower springs from the swollen bud – the hope has come to me that these humble experiments may afford some suggestions in regard to nature’s production of her own beautiful forms, and may thereby aid, in some slight degree, the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe”
“we have only to examine these figures, simple as is the principle that underlies them, to find ourselves face to face with Nature in her almost limitless variety”
Extracts from The Eidophone Voice Figures, 1904 by Margaret Watts Hughes
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