Martin Riches
In: Time Machine: Anciet Egypt and Contemporary Art. Edited by James Putnam and W. Vivian Davies. Published by the Trustees of the British Museum and the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994, p. 38.
This small sound-sculpture attempts to pronounce the name of the Ancient Egyptian Sun God: RA. Visitors are invited to depress the bellows gently. It is not necessary to press very hard; the interior of the shrine, hewn out of solid granite, is an almost perfect reflector of sound and is beautifully resonant.
During the past few years I have become a particularly interested in the problem of speech synthesis - but using acoustic rather than electronic methods. The main result so far has been my 'Talking Machine', a mechanical speech synthesiser which speaks with specially designed 'organ pipes', each of them being in fact a model of the human mouth. The Talking Machine has 32 of these pipes, all different and each corresponding to a different speech-sound. The valves which control the air supply to these pipes are operated by a computer. In English it is capable of speaking a few hundred words and forming sentences and it can also count in Japanese and German.
It was James Putnam, the initiator of this exhibition, who made the startling suggestion that my exhibition should be housed inside this shrine. To avoid disturbing the shrine with bunches of computer cables running in and out of it. I decided that the sound should be produced and controlled manually - by operating a bellows. Having no computer, my 'RA machine' will speak its name a little differently each time - and I am happy that this should be so.
'Rrr' plus 'Ah' equals 'Ra'. The initial 'Rrr' sound is produced by a wooden component which simulates the movement of the tongue inside the mouth. The curved wooden vessel, inside which it moves, is a hollow resonator that roughly reproduces the shape we make inside our mouths when we make the sound 'Ah'; it is based on an X-ray photograph of someone speaking that sound. The square red box underneath this 'mouth' contains a reed which reproduces the sound of the vocal chords. The bellows are the lungs. In other words, the complete instrument is a working model of the human vocal tract. The exhibit is constructed almost entirely of various kinds of plywood, a material first used by the Ancient Egyptians. An Ancient Egyptian craftsman would have had no difficulty in constructing this entire exhibit and there are no lack of precedents, since there are numerous legends and descriptions of talking statues and automata from Egypt.
As soon as I had managed to get the 'RA' mechanism to speak, I noticed that the round metal disc, which I just happened to be using as a counterweight on the 'tongue' component, strongly suggested the sun. It followed that its rising and falling motion could be interpreted as representing the passage of the sun across the sky. Having inadvertently introduced the symbolism, I decided to continue in this vein and added the doors to the upper part of the plinth. These can be seen as a reference to a mechanism devised by Hero of Alexandria, which opened and closed the doors of a shrine when a fire was lit on the altar.
May RA regard my activities with forebearance.