Positively Spooky: Song & Sound through a Wire (Abstract)
Ulrich Meurer2017
Irving Cummings' 1939 biopic The Story of Alexander Graham Bell opens with a woman at the pianoforte and three feisty, well-groomed gentlemen cantillating a popular song (Frances Osgood's " Call me pet names "). This scene sets the tone for the entire movie which, time and again, presents its audience with various work songs, Christmas carols, and choral melodies. However, each of these musical inserts seems complemented and uncannily shadowed by a 'tonal event' associated with the pure physicality of sound: the protagonist will make use of his landlady's piano to demonstrate resonance phenomena in vibrating systems; a festive children's chorus will find its equivalent in the disturbing wail of a deaf-mute boy attempting to pronounce his first word. The effect of such couplings is a continuous and elaborate differentiation between music and noise, embodied and spectral sound, presence and reproduction, natural and technical media. Against this backdrop, the paper explores the movie's musical, or rather tonal rendering of the dual nature of the voice – the " voice-effect " as a precarious concurrence of meaning and physical excess (Mladen Dolar) – and also its overtones of spiritism and the supernatural that become audible when the telephone, based on the material mechanics of the human ear, transmits the disembodied singing of a male vocal group from Boston to Salem, thus revealing what Avital Ronell defines as the " ghostly origin " of the apparatus and its connection to " male witchery ". Furthermore, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell appears to link these issues of song, sound, conjuration and manifestation, of listening [horchen] and obeying [gehorchen] to a complex system of Fathers and Sons that pervades the whole narrative. In so doing, the movie opens into the sphere of the political; it restates music/sound as well as their present/absent sources as agents of a spectral 'call' that demands an either submissive or insurgent response … Meanwhile, the telephone might be that utopian machine in which all those vocal, technological, super/natural, political threads intersect and are, for a brief moment, reconciled.