CAPTAIN VOSTERLOCH AND THE LONG PLAYING SPONGE
by William Sutton
and John Sutton
Do you sing to your sponge? Beware.
If a mysterious Parisian pamphlet of 1632 [see panel] can be credited,
your warblings may be played back the next time it is squeezed.
“A certain Captain Vosterloch has discovered a sponge
used by natives of the southern seas to communicate across long distances. Simply squeeze and the message spoken into it
is be replayed exactly.” [1]
Can a sponge really record sound? Where the legend lies on the scale between
bald fact and pure fiction requires debate:
the source material seems as obscure as the science.
But if Vosterloch did not exist, it seems a tremendous
lark to have invented him. For, as myth,
this fantastic portrayal of sound and porosity forces us to re-examine not only
the humble sponge, but also the history of sound recording, and our notion of
memory itself.
The phonographic poriferum, regarded as myth, takes its
place in a venerable tapestry of historical science fiction.
Ancient China, Greece and Egypt all produced magical
devices to duplicate sound or make statues speak, involving bellows, for
instance, or simply a hidden person. [2]
The 1589 speaking tube of Giovanni Battista Porta prefigures the thousand
mile speaker, a sealed wooden tube invented by Chian Shun-hsin in the
seventeenth century. [3]
Most grotesque is Rabelais’s idea [4]: the death throes of soldiers who died in
freezing icefields are gruesomely replayed when spring thaw the ice. Cyrano [5] convincingly describes talking
books with watch-like gears instead of pages.
A needle placed on the desired chapter produces a quasi-human voice –
speaking the lunar language, of course.
Whereupon we remember that Cyrano also claimed to have visited the moon.
Our South Sea setting raises familiar questions about the
colonial fascination with wonders. Why
do we project such fantasies on to the exotic other? To aggrandise our exploration,
certainly. To claim conquest of things
beyond our ken, perhaps.
What places our myth beyond the stock mythological topoi
is its pseudo-technological status. What
other myth of the exotic is so civilised?
So communicative? So modern?
Neither terrifying like dragons nor awe-inspiring like
the world’s edge, the recording sponge makes its (one and only?) appearance
just as Shakespeare’s Folio is starting to sell like hot cakes across the
channel. If printing techniques could
preserve and disseminate written words and pictures too (in the form of
engravings), why should speech – the most immediate form of communication –
prove recalcitrant?
We know that people were already fantasising about
recording sound. [6] What other
suggestions, besides our sponge, were being made? Let’s remember how easily technologies can be
invented and forgotten. Leonardo’s
helicopter is famed; but who remembers
Valdemar Poulsen? The Dane’s answering
machine, presented at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, was lauded by the press for
a quality of sound reproduction far outstripping the phonograph. [7]
Besides its value as myth and technological barometer,
our supersponge is also a historical metaphor for memory. As we strive to account for the vagaries of
remembering, our metaphors relate intriguingly to prevalent technologies. Nowadays, we tend to draw comparisons with
hard drives and their crashes, websites and their glitches. Not so long ago, we talked of filing things
away in the mind, like index cards and folders into boxes and cabinets.
But memory has been likened to such diverse containers as
the rooms of a house and the stomach of a cow. [8] If a sponge seemed a credible way to record
sound, what light does that cast on seventeenth century neurology and
psychology?
These primitive metazoa provide a familiar folk image for
forgetfulness [9], rather than retaining information. But Porifera – a group successful
since pre-Cambrian times via reproduction both sexual and asexual, viviparous
and oviparous – are valued and studied by biologists for clues as to how more
complex systems have evolved. [10] They
also provide, with their extraordinary cellular structure, fruitful comparison
with current models of the brain. Just
as our neural pathways form and reform in a fluid evolution, so their mobile
cellular systems carry out all vital functions, without developed tissue
organisation.
Perhaps we should hesitate, however, before writing off
the spongiform ansaphone as myth or metaphor.
Consider, behind fantastical sightings of sea monsters, the core
phenomena of whales and giant squid. And
how fanciful dragons sound … until you arrive on Komodo.
Can any spongologists help us uncover the grain of truth
in this pearl of a story? Or is it to historians of sound we should turn? Such a porous tape-recording requires sound
to be liquid: Vosterloch saw voices
soaked up, just as Rabelais described them freezing and thawing. What is the nature of porosity? Solid matter with holes like Swiss
cheese? Or must the stuff itself be
permeable?
Have we been too busy scrubbing ourselves down to
remember the more abstruse qualities of the spongiform? Think twice next time you catch yourself
singing in the bath. Perhaps one day
I’ll buy the White Album again, but on long-playing sponge.
__________________________________________________________ Fortean Times 2004
SIDE-PANELS,
ILLUSTRATION, AUTHOR INFORMATION
ENGRAVING
Draaisma’s book lifts a
wonderful engraving from Marty’s article.
This is footnoted as “A nineteenth century engraving from Le Courrier
Véritable of 1632,” so I can only assume there is no copyright.
SIDE PANEL 1 Le Courrier Véritable,
April 1632
“In this land, reports Captain Vosterloch, nature has
furnished men with certain sponges which retain sound and articulated speech,
just as our sponges do with liquid. So
that when they want to ask something, or confer at a distance, they just speak
near some of these sponges, then, on receiving them, they make the words which
were inside come out by pressing them quite softly and by this admirable means
they know everything that their friends want.”
[11]
“En ce pays, rapporte le capitaine Vosterloch, la nature
a fourni aux hommes de certains esponges qui retiennent le son et la voix
articulée comme les nostres font les les liqueurs. De sorte que quand ils veulent mander quelque chose, ou conférer de
loin, ils parlent seulement de près à quelqu’unes de ces esponges, puis les
ayant reçues, en les pressant tout doucement font sortir ce qu’il y avait
dedans de paroles et scavent par cet admirable moyen tout ce que leurs amis
désirent.”]
SIDE PANEL 2 Le Courrier Not So
Véritable?
Our sources on this proto-dictaphone quibble over every
detail. For instance, de Filippis
locates Vosterloch’s voyage “dans les terres australes au large du détroit de
Magellan,” but others suggest the South Seas, Australia, Antarctica, or South
America.
What is this pamphlet, lurking in the Bibliothèque
Nationale Francaise? One-off broadsheet
or regular newspaper? Is it anonymous or
by the famous Charles Sorel? Draaisma
says Sorel in 1632, Marty goes for 1633, but Levin states that neither author
nor publisher is marked. Calling it “une
gazette satirique” de Filippis applauds the story as appealing but unscientific,
while Levin describes “a thin little book” telling of this “land of people with
bluish-black skin which has no art and no science nor any written exchange.”
Most mysterious of all, who (if anyone) was Captain
Vosterloch? The only scrap of information
– that he was a Dutch sea-captain – comes from Wojciech Waglewski, former
singer of Polish band, Voo Voo. [12]
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Writer/musician, William Sutton, appeared in Ken
Campbell’s fortean epic, ‘The Warp,’ and has just moved to Brazil. wgq42@hotmail.com John Sutton, author of ‘Philosophy and Memory Traces,’
teaches at Macquarie University, Sydney, and presents ‘Ghost in the Machine’ on
East Side Radio. http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/
___________________________________________________________(150
words)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Le Courrier Véritable, April 1632/1633.
Daniel Marty (trans Douglas
Tubbs): The Illustrated History of Phonographs, (Dorset Press, NY, 1981).
D. Draaisma: Metaphors of Memory, a history of ideas about
the mind (Cambridge, 2000).
Thomas Y. Levin: ‘Before the
Beep: A Short History of Voice Mail’ at http://autonomous.org
Alain de Filippis: ‘Les Aventuriers du Son: sur l’emploi du son
et du bruit au fil des siècles et des civilisations …’ at
http://granuvox.free.fr./
Francois Rabelais (trans J.M.
Cohen): The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1955)
Giovanni Battista Porta: Magia Naturalis, 1589.
Cyrano de Bergerac: L’Histoire Comique des Etats de la
Lune (1650).
FOOTNOTES
1 Le Courrier Véritable
2 Marty
3 Levin
4 Rabelais, Book IV, Chapter LVI
5 Cyrano de Bergerac
6 Draaisma
7 Levin
8 Draaisma
9 See for example Bob Williams:
‘Please don’t squeeze the brain sponge’ at
http://www.courier-tribune.com/nws/sq...
10 Patricia R Bergquist: ‘Porifera’ at www.els.net.
11 Our translation from de
Filippis’ excerpt
12
http://www.voovoo.art.pl/media/max/ma...
OTHER POSSIBLE
TITLES
Is there a spongologist in the house?High
Fidelity SpongeSpongiform
Audio TapeDictaspongeListen very carefully, I will squeeze this only once
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