"Megaphone" by Garrett Hongo
an excerpt from The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo, available for sale on 2/15
THE TALKING HEADS
In the 2011 Oscar-winning film Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese and based upon a superb YA novel by Brian Selznick, much of the plot of the tale revolves around an automaton — a mechanical head, torso, and arms — whose operation has ceased. Hugo, the young boy who is its keeper, believes the automaton holds a secret, perhaps a message from his deceased father, who’d made the machine, if only he can make the it run again. Charged by a cruel uncle to keep the huge and magnificent clocks at the Montparnasse train station running, Hugo meets adventure, love, and sponsorship in the bustling environs of the station, while averting abandonment. And, miraculously, the pendant around the neck of the sweet girl who befriends him turns out to be an actual key that unlocks the lifelike operation of the mechanical man. It’s a beautifully humane film with gorgeous cinematography and well deserves its recognition. And, though the mechanical man doesn’t voice but rather writes its message to Hugo, I think it’s about our wish that the world of technology speak back to us with an ulterior loveliness we cannot have predicted merely out of the rough components we’ve engineered to create it. We’ve long wanted its voice, speaking from the dark obscurity of cultural bricolage and applied science, to be reassuring, life-affirming, to buoy us up via the mysticism of mechanics from which it arises.
When the Greek historian Strabo wrote, in 20 BC, that the Memnon of Thebes, one of twin colossi built for the tomb of Amenhotep III (ca. 1350 BCE), sang to crowds gathered around its base, he was reporting from as much from a wish of human culture that our built things had voice as from any verifiable worldly phenomenon. Others of the ancient world — Pausanius, Pliny, Tacitus, Philostratus, and Juvenal — all wrote of the structure’s miraculous sound, like “the string of a lyre” breaking, the striking of brass, or a soft, almost imperceptibly whistling sigh. And during the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon, an English philosopher and friar in the Franciscan order dubbed Doctor Mirabilis, built the first talking head, considered a product sprung as much from necromancy and dark conjure of the dead as from any empirical science. Between 1840 and 1860, Joseph Faber of Vienna constructed various talking devices, the most notable with the features of a woman, made to imitate human speech through a series of reeds, whistles, and resonators operated by a bellows. And, by 1890, the American Thomas Alva Edison created the macabre invention of a talking doll, its insides fitted with a miniature version of his wax cylinder phonograph, operated by a crank sticking out of the doll’s back. That it spoke nursery rhymes with a screechingly eerie female voice evoked both familiarity and distress — a kind of ur-Chucky. When Alexander Graham Bell premiered his telephone on March 10, 1876, he delivered the magically disembodied message, "Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you . . .” to his assistant on the other end of the line. When the tinfoil phonograph of Edison first spoke, it was a recording of its inventor reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in odd, declamatory style, though his voice itself sounded wan and frail. Finally, the Bell Telephone Company at the 1939 New York World’s Fair revived the talking man phenomenon and delighted crowds with a machine operated by an electric keyboard. Recognizable in various degrees, each was a kind of mysterious transmission, most at a remove from its source, and the creation of sound laced with meaning, both pure and impure, the embodiment of vates as though from a voice beyond the norms of human reckoning and yet discernible as meant for us.
Much of the early history behind these voices arising from the varieties of inanimate inventions of humankind is covered in the marvelous book From Tinfoil to Stereo by Walter L. Welch and Leah Brodbeck Stenzel Burt (1994). In it, we read that the remarkable invention of the phonograph came via an accumulation of human effort around ideas of the acoustic transcription and reproduction of sound and then the transmission of them through electricity.
HERBIE’S MOUTH
I might’ve been five when my cousin Herbie Shigemitsu did a memorable and astonishing thing out nearby the Japanese graveyard by the piggery on a sandy promontory in our home village of Kahuku on the island of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi. Herbie was my elder by several years — he was eleven or twelve then — and was impressive to me in every way. For one thing, like an adult man, he wore large aloha shirts and khaki pants rather than the t-shirt and shorts that I did. His clothes rippled in the tradewinds as he smiled and reached into a shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of chewing gum, a speckled cowrie shell he’d found on the beach, or cellophane pack of dried cuttlefish he’d share with me and his other young cousins. For another, he thought up our games and adventures, leading us in raiding the piggery of a few new piglets he’d grab from their pen and stuff under his shirt as we trotted behind through the sandy roads that wound through our village, eager to witness what he’d do with them. Would he pet them or eat them? Would he let them go in the canefields? But he only wanted us to hold them, to see us squeal and giggle as the tiny animals, smaller than cats, wriggled in our hands, eyes closed, nudging their wet noses against our flesh. Then, he gathered them all up, dropping them back inside of his billowing shirt like it was a large, marsupial pouch, and race back to the pen, where he straddled its sides like a Colossus and lowered each piglet back onto its bed of straw, while its huge mother grunted and squealed in anger below his legs. To me, cousin Herbie was a Titan who brought fire to my life.
One afternoon, I think we younger kids were playing on the carpet of pokey temple grass amidst the stones and wooden grave markers in the Japanese graveyard, where two generations of our ancestors had been buried. It was on a sandspit that jutted out into the Pacific and the winds whipped around our bodies in whirling blasts of cool air that seemed like ghosts coiling around us in the otherwise constant subtropical heat of our island. Herbie was over by the wooden fences of the piggery, about a baseball field away, and I saw him bring his hands up to his face and make a kind of cave of his fingers and palms, surrounding his mouth. And then I heard him.
Garrett! Tommy! All you guys! Quick you come! Come now!
He waved then, knowing he’d caught our attention. And we gathered up our things — marbles, slingshots, paper targets, whatever — and ran over to him as he peeled away, headed toward the main part of the village where there was a gas station owned by one of our aunts, a grocery store that sold us our treats, and our great-grandmother’s shack with her garden abundant with papayas, squash, and melons. We obeyed his beckoning without question, his call for us to gather and follow him. And the astonishing thing was, we’d heard him through all that distance and buffets of wind. His voice carried from the piggery across sand dunes covered in sea grapes and the emerald hillocks of the graveyard to our ears. How did he do that? I thought. How did he throw his voice so far?
I can say now that what Herbie made out of his cupped hands was a small acoustic amplification device out of his cupped hands. It altered the relation of his voice to the air so that the compression of the sound waves he made by shouting was increased. At the same time, the volume of air it immediately had to push was made smaller. His cupped hands had restricted the wide field of air from the infinite universe around him to just the amount inside the cone of his hands. He’d changed the ratios of sound wave compression versus the resistance of the air volume it had to pass through. Simply put, his hands made a megaphone around his mouth. This increased air pressure around his mouth, the material it initially traveled through, from an expansive, nearly unlimited space around his mouth to just the cave of his hands instead. His cupped hands presented what amounted to a high acoustic impedance to the sound source, essentially a driver of air. This allowed the driver to develop a high pressure against the little globe of space inside his hands that presented a lower volume of air to be displaced in order for sound to travel. Herbie had made an air-bomb of his voice and a launchpad with his hands. In the audio world, this is known as a compression horn.
Of course, I’d no understanding of any of this at the time. It was plain magic to me and, when I asked him how he did that, he simply said he yelled into his hands ladat.
Ladat? I asked. Just like that? And I tried it, holding my hands in a basket around my mouth. The sound just redounded back at my face.
No, he said, No make one basket in front your face. Jus’ make one tunnel ladat, open at dah mout’ and at dah oddah en’. He showed me again, launching his voice through his cupped hands into the swimming air, backing up farther and farther away from me. Garrett . . . Gaa-rrett! he softly cried, letting the horn of his hands amplify his kind voice.
Now you try, Herbie said.
In the days that followed, we younger kids practiced shouting at each other, through the tunnels of our hands, from opposite sides of the graveyard, from one tip of the little cove on the side of the promontory to the other.
Hey Tommy! You can hear me now or what?
E, Garrett, hear you? More worse I can smell your dirty mout’!
We teased each other with insults, gradually lengthening the distance between us, bouncing from sandspit to canefield, standing beside a row of ironwood trees and shouting down the dirt road that led to the dump where we once found a cache of army K-rations, saying fouler and fouler things until an adult or teenager would hear and start scolding us and we ran away, laughing, marveling at our new powers, our ability to send our voices across the landscape like the curling winds scouring the sands and making scallops on the waters of the ocean that surrounded us.
MEGAPHONE
What my cousin Herbie had shown me was a simple megaphone, an acoustic horn amplifier he made from cupping his hands together. It is perhaps the most primitive if not indeed the first megaphone, originating in pre-history, perhaps around the same era of human culture that as fire itself had entered the life of the species. Like fire, amplification is an invented tool of the late Paleolithic, an ancient part of human culture and deserving of respect, even a measure of worship.
In a YouTube video, Paul McGowan, the audio engineer who presides over PS Audio, a contemporary maker of fine stereo equipment located in Colorado, says, “A megaphone directs and focuses sound the way a lens might an image.” But, more than that, it amplifies sound in the specific way its bell or tunnel compresses air around the speaker or singer’s mouth, and then flares out at the end where it contacts the open air, thus expanding the pressure wave from an initial small source to a larger one. It takes a small connection with the air and, though a process of mechanical coupling, transforms it into a larger one, making the sound bigger too.
The megaphone as an instrument perhaps made its first appearance in ancient Greece around the Fifth Century B.C.. There are ceramics, bas relief, and sculpture that depict actors who wore masks with cones protruding from their mouths. In 1955, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis imitated this style of instrument, actors wearing a version of these masks in a production of Oedipus Rex. But the written record of the megaphone begins with Samuel Morland in 1655, a man who experimented with a variety of acoustic horns, his largest made of a copper tube over twenty feet in length. He claimed it could project the human voice over a mile and a half. A contemporary, Athanasius Kirchner, did him a little better, constructing a wall-mounted, “cochlear” or spiral device that could overhear voices outside a house and also project a voice from inside. Kirchner mounted his relatively compact megaphone into the side of a house with the narrow end inside and the flared end out. In 1878, the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison topped them both with a speaking/hearing trumpet for the deaf and hard of hearing. It was made of three parallel cones deployed in a single row, two outer for hearing and one inner for speaking. The two outer were six feet eight inches long, made of paper, and connected to the listener through a tube inserted in each ear. The middle cone was similar to Morland’s trumpet but had a larger mouthpiece. It could throw a low whisper over a thousand feet and a normal voice about two miles away — longer than the range of a high-power hunting rifle. It could also pick up voices from over a thousand feet away but was a bit cumbersome to carry around, adding, despite its auditory and acoustic prowess, what was equivalent to the bulk of three NBA power forwards onto a normal human body.
Much later, during the early 20th century, Herr Senger, a Swiss opera singer, invented a papier maché megaphone with an elaborate mouthpiece that fit around a speaker’s face, making for a device with much better clarity, fuller vocal tone, and pleasing resonance than the usual device of the time, made with a sheet of brass shaped into a cone. Its mouthpiece covered the lower part face and nostrils too, making for great vocal projection as well, finding use in a production of poet Edith Sitwell’s Façade: An Entertainment (from poems written in 1918 but first performed in 1923), a kind of drawing room opera made of a series of her poems written in rhythms styled after dances like the waltz, fox trot, and polka. Its music was written by William Walton, now best remembered best for his Violin Concerto (1937), commissioned by Jascha Heifetz, and Cello Concerto (1956), recorded by Gregor Piatigorsky, Heifetz’s frequent chamber partner. The Sengerphone was used to project a voice from behind a large drop curtain with a hole cut into it where its mouth projected out, so the audience would respond only to the voice and music and not the personality of the singer — a completely uncanny and wacky Modernist strategy of performance, making at once for a more organic and natural sound, and yet allowing it to emerge from a kind of alienating, mechanical presence.
Also early in the 20th century, movie directors in Hollywood used the megaphone to direct “casts of thousands” on location and on the immense studio sets of the time. Cecile B. DeMille used megaphones to direct the extras who played Egyptian slaves in The Ten Commandments (1923) and the Israelites and Roman soldiers in The King of Kings (1927). Charlie Chaplin used one too, demonstrating the political neutrality of the instrument, serving the needs of both conservative and leftist filmmakers. It’s ironic that an amplifier would be an important tool used to direct so many silent films.
But there’s a big downside to the megaphone. The human voice (or a parrot’s or chimpanzee’s for that matter) gets amplified, but its frequency balance is thrown off, the bass sound dropping away and the mid- to higher frequencies getting a boost, thus producing the characteristic “tinny” or nasal sound, absent of foundation from the lower frequencies, emphasizing the upper level of the vocal range as well as making it sound louder. Everything below about 90 Hertz (high bass) gets attenuated, below about 50 Hertz (low bass) gets cut out completely. Concomitantly, the upper middle frequencies (between 2kHz and 5kHz—the higher registers of the human voice) are emphasized, resulting in the megaphone’s characteristic squawk. And, if the megaphone is made of brass, as most were in the early 20th century, you get that “tinny” sound of the later Gramophones, with their iconic flower-bell amplifying horns as a bonus. This is evident in the vocal style of the early crooners of the 20th century like Rudee Vallee, a Yalie whose natural voice was thin and reedy compared to the operatic belters of earlier recordings like the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. To compensate for the weakness of his voice during live performances, Vallee sang through a megaphone so he wouldn’t be drowned out by the musicians in his band, the Connecticut Yankees. When they broadcast their shows on the Fleischman’s Radio Hour, band leader Vallee still sang through a megaphone as that was the voice his public was accustomed to and it had become a signature sound. When they recorded tunes like “Makin’ Whoopee” (Velvet Tone, 1929) and ‘The One in the World” (Victor, also 1929), he sang into the microphone through a megaphone too. Later, to get that antique, old-time American music hall sound to some of his tunes, Beatle Paul McCartney imitated this, using modern electronic techniques, on “Lady Madonna” (Parlophone/Capitol, 1968) from Hey Jude (Apple, 1971) and “Honey Pie” from The White Album (Apple, 1968). So did John Carter, the lead singer of the New Vaudeville Band, on their recording “Winchester Cathedral,” a Grammy Award-winning hit from 1966. In fact, in order to get that particular sound during the recording session, Carter is said to have sung the tune through his hands.
ACOUSTIC AMPLIFICATION
The megaphone is just one item in the history of acoustic amplification. Humankind has been trying to amplify sound for millennia, using tools, architecture, spatial designs, and natural land formations in order to project sound across varied distances. Herbie’s younger brother, my cousin Tommy, once stood before a seaside hollow in the cliff below the Japanese cemetery in our village in Hawai’i and used it as an acoustic shell to lend volume and gravity to an impressively improvised speech he was making — a chop suey version of Lincolnʻs “Gettysburgh Address” mixed in with snippets of dialogue from Hopalong Cassidy. The concave shell of waveworn rock behind him launched his voice, impressively stentorian, over us whoʻd gathered to hear him and the smooth stones of the beach toward the gasping sea, the only other audience that could confirm its grandeur. The Greek amphitheater at Epidaurus, built in the 4th century B.C., is purported to have been built so that a whisper or a coin dropped on its stage could be heard from its rear seats, over fifty-five rows away. The poet Etheridge Knight, who’d spent years in lockup at Indiana State Penitentiary, once demonstrated to me the differences between hog-calls, field hollers, and prison songs to me as we stood in a meadow at MacDowell Colony, an artist retreat in New Hampshire. He lifted his big, natural baritone voice into the tenor range and shouted into his hands as I stood perhaps fifty meters away, marveling at the hoots and quavers reaching me across the blond heads of swaying summer grasses. Later, he took me to his studio and stood outside the open door of the bathroom and sang “Willow, Weep for Me” into it, his voice reverberating against its tiled walls and floor, amplified into a sharpness and clarity not afforded by open air. He said, when he was in prison, inmates would sing rhymes and vulgar toasts into the chamber of the cellblock, letting their voices echo and bounce, entertaining and annoying each other, playing cutting games, competing to be the funniest, the loudest, the most profane. Novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher once told me that, traveling Europe the year after heʻd graduated from college, he found himself on the steps of the temple at Delphi one night, surrounded by the din of thousands of cicadas thrumming and churring and exciting the air around him, to the point that he felt himself wanting to flee as though Erinyies were pursuing him, feasting on his eardrums. Maurice White, lead singer and founder of the funk group Earth, Wind, and Fire, in a song from Open Our Eyes (Columbia, 1974), their fifth studio album, praised the African kalimba, a kind of piano that sings its sweet notes from a wooden resonator board fitted with metal tines plucked by a playerʻs thumbs. Jun Kuramoto of the fusion group Hiroshima plays the koto, a Japanese lute over a thousand years old in design (derived from the even older Chinese guzheng) that uses thirteen taut strings strung over thirteen movable bridges and a resonating board made of paulownia wood, carefully planed by traditional craftsmen. Its ethereal song is said to emanate from the head, horns, fiery tongue, and stomach of a dragon. And, when I was ten, my maternal grandmother, Tsuruko Kubota, who worked as a maid in Beverly Hills, took me to an outdoor concert at the Pilgrimage Theater in Los Angeles to hear violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, with a chamber group of distinguished others, play the Brahms String Sextet No. 2 in G major and Mendelssohnʻs Octette in E-flat major from a stage surrounded by rock stairs and a background skene of stone pillars and cubicles that spun the sound of their incomparable instruments, vibrating wood and strings, into the night air over my head in a way I’ve never forgotten, rich and sinuous, ample as time.
BANDSHELL
Tommy Shigemitsu, a year or two older than me and a few inches taller, stood facing the concave hollow of earth cut by the sea and wind into the cliffs below the Japanese graveyard near our village. The wind blew and whipped around us, flapping the cloth of our swim shorts against our thighs, streaming our hair like black banners of seaweed into the currents of air. He was a skinny kid, but heʻd wrapped a bedroom quilt around his shoulders and torso, making him look bigger and oddly transformed into something like a statue or a store manikin. The quilt was a thing made of colorful triangles of leftover scraps stray cloth scavenged from leftover pieces from the sewing of women’s dresses and muumuus, throw pillows, and the zabuton adults used to sit on the floor while they played poker and hanafuda, a rummy game of cards with flower suits. He was intoning something I did not understand, though it was in English. It was something from a film or television I gathered, as he spoke like a film star with an English accent, deepening his voice, throwing it out from the shallow cave of earth to the stones shining with sea spray on the beach, to us other kids standing stupefied as he declaimed:
Four score and seven years ago,
Our fathers brought forth
On this Hawaiʻi a new nation
Conceive in liberty and dedicated
To the sugar plantation
Where all men must be paid equal.
His voice was rich and resonant — not like his normal speaking voice — and it rose above the light chatter of stones as we, barefooted, circled awkwardly around him, gradually falling under the spell of his melodious speech and stood still as he continued:
Now is the winter of our diss kine tent
Made glorious summer by this ton of pork;
And all the clouds made lava on our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Tommy was taking speeches heʻd learned from a book and twisting them around, talking like an actor, but making up meanings that only he understood. We younger kids meanwhile felt only the weight of his words, the high dudgeon of his speech — how it fell against our ears in stately rhythms — the amplification of his voice as he intoned against the cliffside that rose up around him like an earthen flame cupped around his robed figure. Tommy had found a natural band shell and occupied its space like it was a reverberant stage where he could launch his voice over us and the stones of the beach toward the pitching gasping sea, the only audience that could confirm his grandeur.
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Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaiʻi, and grew up on the North Shore of Oʻahu and in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays, Coral Road: Poems, Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai‘i, and most recently, The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo, published by Pantheon Books. He lives in Eugene, Oregon and is Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. THE PERFECT SOUND comes out tomorrow! Preorder it here.
