Text: n you see noise? According to the 19th-century singer and devout Congregationalist Margaret Watts Hughes, there was a way of permanently visualising vocal qualities. In 1885, she stretched an elastic membrane across the bell of a speaking-trumpet (a device she named the "eidophone"). Then, while someone sang or spoke into the trumpet, she drew the vibrating membrane away from a glass plate covered with watercolour paint. The resulting patterns in the paint are not random, but form geometric shapes, shell-like multiple curves or images suggestive of organic growth. Watts published her pictures, which she called "voice figures", in two books published in 1891 and 1904. Some of them now form part of an exhibition, "n01se", currently running at several museums in Cambridge. Watts herself seems to have regarded the figures as principally of scientific or musical interest, rather than works of art. But the exhibition as a whole draws no such distinction. Ostensibly about "information and transformation", it thrusts together an extraordinary variety of works linked only by the questions they raise about human perception of sound and light, and how we give these sensations meaning.

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