Modern Voices from a Local and Global Perspective

In the Royal Library at Windsor Castle you can find one of the oldest phonographic recordings in the world: it is a cylinder, recorded in 1899, and it contains a Royal Voice.

Containing voices

I say ‘containing’ quite deliberately here: early sound technology has a curious materiality that most of us have now largely forgotten. In order for this royal voice to be preserved, a great many physical, material things needed to happen.

1. The sound needed to be produced by an exalted, royal body

2. The soundwaves thus created needed to be transformed into physical movement

3. This movement then needed to be made permanent. By pressing a stylus into wax, for example, or by carving grooves into a phonogram

4. The resulting object then had to travel to a place where it would, eventually, be preserved

All of these steps were still quite precarious, at the end of the nineteenth century. Recording devices were often mistrusted. As had been the case for photography, earlier, the process of creating and preserving a recording of someone’s voice was often feared to also capture part of their soul, which would forever be trapped in the wax, and at risk of manipulation by nefarious others. This, too, is what I mean when I say that the voice held at Windsor Castle is not merely preserved, but contained within a cylinder.

The fears connected to sound technology in the late nineteenth century were fuelled by numerous cultural representations of the gramophone as a device that allowed Victorians to converse ‘beyond the grave’: spiritualists would gather around the early recording machines to gain access to the afterlife, famous people were recorded with the specific aim of preservation after death. Well into the 20th century, this is what the gramophone represented: an acoustic afterlife, accessible through materiality yet intrinsically eerie. In 1920, James Joyce let his character wonder – in Ulysses –

how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseera gain hellohello amarawf kopthsth.

If the container of the voice is a material one, certainly at this time, what is contained was often thought of as material too – or at the very least as physical and embodied. The nineteenth century saw an unprecedented interest in the physical conditions that allowed for the production of voice. We can think of a number of reasons why that is the case:

• The rise of democracy made individual voices significantly more salient than they had been before: citizens were learning to believe that their voices mattered – but they were also learning to listen to their rulers’ voices far more critically. Who could be trusted with a precious vote? Who spoke truthfully and authentically, and who merely produced hot air?

• A growing number of people supported their lives by using their voices professionally: not only merchants and singers continued to do so, but teachers, lawyers, foremen,…an ever larger contingent of people lived by ‘the gift of the gab’

Whatever the reason, a large number of people would start to think of themselves as ‘speakers’ of some sort of description, and the conflagration of their sense of self (deeply rooted in their experience of their own body, and its many idiosyncrasies) and their means of articulation (which of course bore the hallmarks of those physical idiosyncrasies) led to minute attention to the physical production of voice. The whole body would be subjected to that attention: modern interpretations of sound production were not simply mechanical – the old model of the lungs as bellows and the throat as an organ pipe was on the way out – and modern interpretations of the voice were holistic, deeply concerned with how vocal practice could not only produce a sound that made one’s personality exterior and public, but also one that would, intrinsically and necessarily, be mobile beyond the speaker’s mouth.

Sound travels.

Travelling voices

This was something natural philosophers knew already, of course – and arguably, even long before that, any mountain dweller knew full well that a word produced in one place could arrive, perhaps a bit distorted, somewhere entirely different. With the advent of recording, however, the mobile nature of sound gained new meaning as well. For a long time, the physicality of the word as it moved from one person’s mouth to another’s ears had something of the metaphorical (and this is of course, to a point, how sound’s mobility works, physically, as well: a tongue and a gust of air creates sound waves, which fall upon an eardrum: both the production and the reception of sound are extremely local affairs, in that sense).

With the rise of audio technology, however, travel of sound over much longer distances became conceivable: the telegraph was already showing that dits and dah’s could travel further and faster than any steam engine. By the turn of the 20th century, cables carrying this sonified and visualized information were connecting Europe, the America’s, Asia and North Africa. As the work of, for example, Arthur Asseraf has shown, these cabled networks contributed significantly to the creation of a world that became globalized far beyond the confines of what could be seen as a colonial or post-colonial imagination: telegraph lines brought Algerians into contact with French news, for example, but also helped along the creation of a Pan-Islamic community, neatly bypassing the corridors of power created by colonial connections.

It is no wonder then, perhaps, that sound’s increasing ability to cover distances, in conjunction with its intrinsically eerie nature, led to its own specific anxieties. If the recording and containment of sound was distrusted in some places, its displacement was eyed equally uneasily in others. I want to draw your attention here to the example of Japan: Japan was extraordinarily quick at embracing the dits and dah’s of telegraphy: the telegraph was introduced to the island by the Dutch in 1853, and the Meiji government invested heavily in the expansion of a thickly laid network, and the development of morse code to represent the katakana syllabary. At the same time – or rather, ever so slightly later – the telephone befell a completely different fate: the Japanese were decidedly unwilling to embrace a technology that allowed vocal sounds to travel. This had something to do with the efficiency of the existing telegraphy network (as Kerim Yasar has found in his study of sound technology in 20th century Japan), but also with deep seated beliefs about the cultural and spiritual value of human voices in Japan. (Some of you may be familiar with the unique recording of emperor Hirohito’s speech in 1945, which would mark the first – and extremely late – recording of a Japane’s emperor’s voice).

For our Royal Voice contained in the Windsor Library, the telephone and the radio came too late: this voice had to travel by much more obviously material means. And this is perhaps also the point where I can reveal whose voice I have been talking about: it is that of King Emperor Menelik II, the king of Ethiopia. Menelik had recorded both his and his wife’s voice in response to a similar recording made by queen Victoria in 1888. Her voice, however, was not meant to be so contained: Victoria had given strict instructions that the cylinder on which her vocal tones were inscribed, was to be destroyed after replay. In fact, Victoria had been extremely reluctant to be recorded: the über-mediatized queen, whose photographs were all over the newspapers, hanging in every home, etched onto – seemingly – every teapot and biscuit tin in England and beyond, was consistently refusing to have her voice immortalized. Edison, reportedly, tried to convince her multiple times to no avail. The lady was not for turning:  Victoria refused to be made present where her visible image was absent.

Voice as presence

Both the initial reluctance of the Queen to be recorded and, eventually, the journey of her voice – by means of a phonogram – to Ethiopia, are significant, I think, and tell us something about the unique values that were assigned to the human voice in this period, and the way it was perceived as an avatar of not only an individual’s personality, but also of their social stature and political status.

Voices, in the modern political imagination, carried weight. As Wayne Koestenbaum has suggested,

“in Western metaphysics, the spoken or sung word has more authority than the written word. The myth that voice accords presence remains compelling, even though we are supposed to know better”

For Victoria, to be recorded on a phonogram therefore meant to assign something of herself, and something of her royal authority, to the phonogram, to relinquish some control over her presence in the world to a piece of machinery. This was something considered not worth the risk for most of her political career, but apparently that calculation was reconsidered in the case of Menelik II. The 1897 treaties forged between the Ethiopian and the British Empire, and the subsequent diplomatic relationship between both powers, apparently required more than the exchange of letters or gifts.

It is testament to the diplomatic acumen of the Foreign Office, perhaps, that they pushed so hard for Victoria to engage with this new machinery: the Ethiopian emperor’s answer upon receipt of the recording shows great appreciation for this particular gift (or at least the performance of appreciation), and his wife’s response might tell us something about why they, as speakers of Amharic, were peculiarly impressed with it: “she says my name”, the empress reportedly noted when listening to a message she, presumably, could not understand linguistically, but interpreted as a mark of respect precisely because of its vocal and declarative nature. This interpretation of a vocal exhortation was explicitly local (and notably one Victoria did not share: when she received Menelik’s recording in return, she seems to have cared very little for it), but was forged on a global stage, in the fires of imperial diplomacy – and it was indicative of a time to come, when travelling voices would become dominant forces in the public sphere with the rise of the radio. As [Sebastian Conrad] notes in his study of the global impact of the image of Neferteti, “global integration affected cultural norms and aesthetic perceptions in different parts of the world”, and the universal appeal of certain standards of beauty did not simply derive from a dominant West. Rather – as we learn through the travelling phonograms of both Menelik and Victoria – it is through material interaction, by the means of technology, that a universalizing idea about the voice ‘as’ presence and authority became globally significant.

I started this talk with a reflection on a voice ‘contained’ in a British archive – a voice that eventually turned out to be African, rather than British, and whose willingness to be contained could too easily be interpreted as affected by colonial ideas about European technological superiority and African ambitions to partake in them. I therefore want to end with a recommendation: if, this afternoon, you don’t quite know what to do with your time, look for the “Queen Victoria Recording” on YouTube. What you will find there is, possibly, the message the queen once recorded for emperor Menelik. Not the one sent to Ethiopia, but a second cylinder preserved by technical engineer Sydney Morse. For several years, this recording was lost (Morse’s grandchildren had vague memories of hearing it played), but it is now believed to be held at the Science Museum in London. All you will be able to recognize is crackling, but the soundwaves that hit your ears may, very well, ‘be’ queen Victoria, addressing an Ethiopian emperor.

This piece was first delivered as a talk at the seminar “Intellectual History and History of the Body”, 5 June 2026, organized by the German Institute of Amsterdam.