| Abstract: | The history of spiritualist sound experiments – from nineteenth‐century ‘trumpet manifestations’ to contemporary ‘electronic voice phenomena’ – represents a sustained engagement with electrical noise and its psychic, linguistic, and media‐technological implications. While the study of noise generally focuses on music and cinema sound, in which its transgressive nature is often recuperated back into artistic production, spiritualist efforts to record so‐called transmissions from the dead illustrate the ways in which noise resists conscious mediation or artistic representation. A closer study of their methods and practices shows that the real, physical‐acoustic nature of voice phenomena even resists the spiritualists' own attempts to translate and interpret these noises as coherent ‘messages’. Through an examination of the history of spiritualist sound experimentation in the Nineteenth Century and its continued practice following the development of the radio and tape recorder in the Twentieth Century, this paper argues that the spiritualists' enduring fascination with noise exposes the connections between sound technologies, psychic phenomena and schizophrenic hallucinations which pose a threat to the autonomy and integrity of the listening and speaking subject. |
