A dramatic advance in voice storage, processing and retrieval technologies has taken place during the last few years, a transformation that has already begun to show up in appliances that have suddenly begun to 'talk', announcing with uninvited familiarity that 'you have twenty three messages' or reminding one, as a rented car did recently in an annoyingly insistent manner, to fasten one's seatbelt. In America the futuristic thrill of navigating a complex of touch-tone menus in order to avoid an interminable hold and the resulting musak migraine is by now a commonplace.

Prompted by pre-recorded, synthetic voices, we are increasingly encountering and exploiting all sorts of interactive, remote controlled, intelligent data processing machines. What I am referring to, of course, is the conjunction of affordable, high speed computing power and sophisticated, as well as affordable, AD (analogue to digital) and DA (digital to analogue) conversion devices, i.e. contraptions that translate sound into digital information and vice-versa. Among the more visible of the various products that this alliance has produced in conjunction with the telephone, for example, is the phenomenon of voice mail, i.e. the step beyond the (still largely) electro-magnetic answering machine to the digitalised storage of analogue traces which can be retrieved (re-analogised) upon command. Even more state-of-the-art is voice email. Transmitted via the already widespread networks for electronic mail, voice email allows one to 1) play back email as acoustic information, 2) transmit voice messages via a computer network (send someone a greeting that they will 'hear' when they 'read' their 'mail', 3) verbally annotate a file as it scrolls by on somebody else's screen, and 4) -- this is still in its very initial stages -- speak data into the computer rather than typing it.

Sound is thus slowly breaking into the domain of digital information processing systems, expanding a computer age still largely dominated by text (i.e. data and word processing) and (increasingly) image (autocad, etc.). As an unabashedly logocentrist author in PC Magazine puts it, rehearsing a litany of phonocentrist clichés:

Why would you want to hear voices over your network? Because, as humans, we used verbal expressions years before we began writing, and for many people verbalising is easier and more satisfying than jotting thoughts down on paper. Speaking potentially evokes greater emotion, conveys greater sincerity, and promotes a higher level of trust than writing. What this means is that, most likely, in the years to come people will be using more and more voice in their 'documents', including, of course, dispatches of electronic voice mail. The computer is becoming a site of tele-phony, a sending of the voice as data. But...for your voice to be sent, it must...be translated into a form that can be stored, transported and reproduced; it too must, in other words, become writing.²

However strange the idea of writing with sound, I think most people do have some memory of a primitive voice mail experience, probably that now charmingly anachronistic use of the post to send friends recorded 'letters' (acoustic epistles) on audiocassette tape, or, depending upon your age, on records recorded in booths specially outfitted for that purpose. I describe these as primitive, of course, only because of the dramatic discrepancy between the speed and quality of the recording and the much slower rate of their subsequent transmission, a frustrating inequality that may well be one of the reasons for their ultimate failure.³ Nevertheless, it is just this sort of rather literal voice mail or acoustic sendings that concern me here, that is, voice mail understood as the inscription, storage and retrieval of acoustic traces on material media physically sent to a destination. For this sort of seemingly retrograde voice transmission may well explain a lot about the more sophisticated voice mail systems that so many of us increasingly revel in, resist and/or resent. What follows, then, is a provisional archaeology of this sort of voice mail, a history that culminates with the beep of that currently most widespread type of voice mail technology: the answering machine.

The answering machine itself, however, is hardly as 'completely modern' as most people assume. Indeed, this now so widespread domestic technology was in fact invented in 18⁹⁸ by the Danish physicist and engineer Valdemar Poulsen (18⁶⁹ - 1942), pioneer of wireless or radio telegraphy and the man who broke the Marconi monopoly in the British Empire. Poulsen first presented his device to the public at the Paris Exhibition in 1900, officially divulging the details of his discovery in the ²² September 19⁰⁰ issue of Scientific American,⁴ the same year Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. And yet this late nineteenth century contraption -- known variously as the 'recording telephone' the telegraphone, the telegraphophone or the telephonograph -- did not differ in any fundamental technical way from our contemporary answering machines. Patented in 18⁹⁹ as a means of 'storing up speech or signals by magnetic influence', the telegraphone employed a steel wire or band (and soon thereafter a steel disc) instead of the now ubiquitous magnetic tape, recording acoustic information in the form of electro-magnetic impulses and allowing for the indefinite storage or subsequent obliteration of these inscriptions on a medium whose inscribability was in no way compromised by being erased. In fact, the quality of the recordings were lauded by contemporary science writers as being significantly better than those of the phonograph. Even the employment of this device was from the start hardly different from that of today. But why, if the answering machine was effectively invented in the nineteenth century, did it take so long to get developed? Why, for example, did it take thirty years before an article in the New York Times of ²⁷ June 19³¹ announced the impending marketing of the first telegraphone in the US with the headline 'Phone Messages to be Recorded'?

Of crucial concern here is the fact that the invention of the answering machine marks an important shift in the voice mail paradigm, belonging to a technological episteme in which the voice itself travels per telephone and activates a remote inscription device. Here, in other words, the sending, the epistellein of the epistle, the materiality of the transmission, appears to have been dramatically transformed, having become as rapid as the act of recording. Despite this seeming instantaneity, however, I would suggest that it is a mistake to succumb to the temptation of considering telephonic or digital voice mail as no longer material, since -- as anybody who has had a 'bad' telephone connection knows -- the media of such inscriptions must still be understood as having a materiality, albeit one whose phenomenality is of a very different order, i.e. is no longer tangible. In other words, the missives of telephonic and digital voice mail still get lost, misdirected, damaged, delayed, etc., just as did their more primitive predecessors. What the newer forms allow one to overlook, however, is the very fact of that materiality and the practice of inscription which is their condition of possibility. The ur-history of that materiality, of the longstanding dream of voice mail, will hopefully make clear that the history of voice mail cannot be understood apart from the history of the attempts to capture the acoustic, to render sound as writing, the history of the graphe or gramme of phone, which is to say, the history of the phonograph and gramophone.

The vision of voice mail is a motif that dates back not three decades, as one might expect, but almost three centuries.⁵ According to some accounts, this rather long history of voice mail begins in China during the reign of K'ang-hsi in the seventeenth century. A device, invented by Chiang Shun-hsin of Hui-chou, which became known as the 'thousand-mile speaker' allowed a sender to speak into a wooden cylinder which was then sealed and sent sometimes thousands of miles. On arrival, the recipient broke open the seal and the voice message re-sounded. Basically, the idea here is that since sound is a spatial phenomenon (a vibrating mass of air), if you could capture that vibrating air mass in some sort of container, you could liberate it from its tie to the body, to presence. A similar image of sound conserved in tubes recurs on a number of occasions, such as the seemingly well-known speaking-tube described in the Greek scholar Giovanni Battista Porta's Magia Naturalis of 1589. The primitive model of physical conservation here is given a subtle (and literal) twist by J. J. Becher's 16⁸² description of the stentrophonium which this adviser to Prince Ruprecht of Pfalz is reported to have discovered in the workshop of a Nuremberg optician and mechanical artisan named F. Grundel. This machine, so Becher claims, was capable of 'catching many words as an echo by means of a spiral line within a bottle in such a way that one could carry it for almost an hour over land' and then, upon opening, the words would sound anew. Even Becher describes the idea as fantastic, but notes that one ought not fail to attempt to make it a reality (note here the invocation of another important proto-gramophonic form: the spiral).

Even more amazing is the Moon book described by Cyrano de Bergerac in 16⁵⁶ in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune. Recounting his arrival on the moon, Cyrano tells of being given two strange books which one did not read but, instead, listened to. Each contained a complex of watch-like gears and the pages had no letters. One read them 'with one's ears', he explains.⁷ In order to grasp the contents one simply placed a needle on the desired chapter and -- as if spoken by a human voice -- one would hear it, loud and clear, albeit in the lunar language, of course.

Barely a generation later, there begin a series of attempts to translate this idea of sound writing itself into a practical technology. Consider, for example, the apparatus that measures the vibrations of sounding bodies described by Thomas Young in his 18⁰⁷ Course of lectures on natural philosophy and mechanical arts: here Young takes a tuning fork made to sound by bowing, and affixes to it a pen that draws the wave form corresponding to the pitch on a rotating cylinder. The same basic translation of sound into graphic traces also informs the appropriately named 'phonautograph' invented by the typographer Leon Scott of Martinville in 1858. In the mid 1850s Scott replaced the tuning fork with a sensitive membrane and a horn, rendering his device capable of capturing the acoustic waves in the air produced by various types of sound and translating them into wiggly lines inscribed on a charcoal-blackened paper mounted on a turning cylinder. Crucial here is to note that this apparatus was -- true to its name -- only an autograph, a self-writing as traces of sound. This is, of course, only the realisation of the first part of the tube voice mail fantasy: the capturing of the sounds as potentially transportable and then potentially readable inscription.

With the invention of photography the realisation of the essential second stage of voice mail -- the restoration or retranslation of these traces back into sound -- begin to proliferate. Typical in this regard was how Nadar himself in 18⁵⁶ came up with the idea of a daguerreotype acoustique which would faithfully record and reproduce sounds with a fidelity comparable to that of the photograph. In 18⁶⁴ he again mused:

One of these days it will come to pass that someone will present us with the daguerreotype of sound -- the phonograph -- something like a box within which melodies would be fixed and retained, the way the camera surprises and fixes images. To such an effect that a family, I imagine, finding itself prevented from attending the opening of a Force del destino or an Afrique, or whatever, would only have to delegate one of its members, armed with the phonograph in question, to go there. And upon his return: 'How was the overture?' 'Like this!' 'Too fast?' 'There!' 'And the quintet?' 'Don't you think the tenor screeches a bit?'9

It was not Nadar, however, but another Frenchman, Charles Cros, a brilliant French poet, artist, and scientist (author of the first two-colour photographic process), who took Scott's idea and pushed it one step further, proposing in a dossier deposited at the Paris Academy of Sciences on ³⁰ April 18⁷⁷ that one replace the charcoal paper with a wax cylinder onto which a needle would engrave the traces transmitted to it by the sensitive membrane. This is a major step, for by incising these waves, they could subsequently be retraced by another needle -- or another stylus -- which could translate them back into an acoustic event. Here was the principle for a machine -- the paleophone -- that accomplished both inscription and subsequent reproduction. The only problem was that the poor poet Cros -- a friend of Verlaine's, and favorite son of the Surrealists -- was just that: poor. He thus did not have the money to actually build his device, which he christened the Parliophone. Then, to Cros' dismay, the ¹⁷ November 18⁷⁷ issue of Scientific American announced that work was being done in Menlo Park on the bold and original idea of recording the human voice upon a strip of paper, from which at any subsequent time, it might automatically be redelivered with all the vocal characteristics of the original speaker accurately reproduced. Fearing -- and rightly so -- that he would not be credited as having been the first to propose such a device, Cros demanded that his dossier be opened and read at the Academy, which it finally was on

⁵ December 1877. Two weeks later Edison, who had been able to actually build a working model of his phonograph, applied for a patent.

The main utility of the phonograph, [is] for the purpose of letter writing and other forms of dictation, the design is made with a view to its utility for that purpose.¹²

Edison envisioned that 'phonogram' sheets containing as much as four thousand words each would eventually become the primary epistolary form. What we have here is nothing less than the first, literal, voice mail, the birth of what elsewhere would come to be known as the phonopostal.

Unlike the cylinder phonographs used for dictation machines, the phono-post apparatuses were often disc machines, a flat medium -- based on the gramophone model developed by Emil Berliner in Washington in 18⁸⁷ -- preferable less because of its resemblance to traditional writing surfaces than for the ease with which it could be mailed. The apparatuses marketed especially for this purpose included the Phonopostal, a small, rather low quality machine, and Pathi's Pathipost machine introduced in 19⁰⁸ and sold in limited quantities through WWI after which its name was changed to Pathigraph. The phono-post, effectively the first not merely fantasmatic but actually functional voice mail, unfortunately had problems: the inferior quality of the phonographs produced recordings that were difficult to understand

(to which it must be added that few people knew the proper way to speak into the horn in order to get the maximum clarity); and the recording medium itself was quite fragile.

The subsequent history of phono-post is short-lived, voice mail having to wait for the advent of the next popularly available read/write technology: the tape deck. In the meantime, a commercialised variant of phono-post appeared; the largely gimmick-oriented fad in the late 1940s and 1950s for gramophonic postcards -- images that one could play on a phonograph. These curious artifacts -- fascinating in that the two systems of their doubly inscribed surfaces (photographic and gramophonic) in no way interfere with each other despite the exponential increase in the density of information -- are not acoustic epistles in the same sense, for here sound (and image) are pre-fabricated, leaving only the traditional obverse space of the postcard for a penned missive. However, as a transportable materialisation of sound they are nevertheless part of the tradition of postally transmitted acoustic inscriptions.

The late 1950s saw the birth of yet another type of sendable acoustic data -- the first acoustic news magazine: Sonorama. This complex artifact, comprised of image, text and 33rpm discs to be 'read with the ear', effectively adds, so we read in the premier issue of October 1958, a new sensory dimension to print media, giving radio news a memory trace; a duration that exceeds its transmission. Spiral bound and punctured in the middle with a hole, one turns the pages of this journal, reading articles and then placing the entire object on the gramophone, in order to listen to the acoustic documents, music and interviews that make up the other 'pages'. Made possible by the development of high quality record pressing on very thin vinyl (flexidisks), the multimedia journal Sonorama, which continued well into the 1960s, never provoked the dramatic revolution in the history of the press that its founders anticipated. In its juxtaposition of text, image and sound, in its insistence on the status of sound as text, it did, however, make an important point about the condition of possibility

of the material storage, transmission and reproduction of sound, namely that it too is, in an important sense, writing. The proximity of the photographic, textual and gramophonic traces in Sonorama only served to foreground their semiotic heterogeneity. Unlike the photographs and articles which usually can be read by means of our 'built in' apparatus (along with the necessary technological supplements such as glasses, etc.), the acoustic 'texts' usually did require an external interface in order to be read (indeed one that -- through its spinning -- momentarily rendered the others unreadable). Even the latter condition seems only contingent, if one is to take seriously the case of Tim Wilson, a ³³ year old Englishman who made the rounds of British and American talkshows in 19⁸⁵ demonstrating his particular ability to 'read' unlabeled records simply by looking at them, ostensibly reading the patterns of the grooves with his eyes! Alas, this rather hilarious confirmation of Moholy-Nagy's vision of a gramophonic 'groove-script' remains unavailable to most people for whom the phonograph 'pages' remain undecipherable without the required technical prosthesis. Although recognisable as inscriptions in their concentric spiral form, it is these very traces that are being obliterated and/or reconfigured in the pop-cultural practice of scratch.

What then can one learn in the school of scratch? Many things, surely, but among them, a lesson about the historicity of the inscriptional status of sound, a point also explored by contemporary work on the gramophone by artists such as Stuart Sherman or Maurizio Kagel. For with the elimination of the literal grooviness of sound, acoustic writing has entered a new episteme, a new paradigm called the digital. Today sound, image and text

are all 'written' in the same digital language, a language whose 'fidelity' and 'longevity' depends -- as voice mail always has -- on the particular qualities of its mode of inscription. What we see here in this field of pure difference -- which is to say the condition of writing as such -- is also, of course, sound as writing, but it is an inscription of a significantly different sort. No longer an indexical trace, this digital code has abandoned the order of the analogue which characterised both the photograph and the gramophone, revealing the hidden semiotic solidarity between the two elements of the gramophonic postcards: a now anachronistic indexicality. If both the photo- and the phono-graphs bore some sort of existential semiotic relation to the information they contained -- this being their analogic character -- digital code is a writing that forsakes that economy entirely, providing us with reliability of transmission by transforming analogy into information, a sampling of the acoustic curve approximately 44,1⁰⁰ times per second which is then translated into 14, ¹⁶ or ¹⁸ digit strings of zeroes and ones. It is this that allows us, with contemporary voice mail systems, to not only record, revise and/or erase a message remotely, but also to literally send it elsewhere and to multiple addresses.