Aklare Delal Une – Google Docs
Aklare Delal Une
Yes, yes, focus on the audio file. That’s the idea. Fix your gaze and horrified ears on what is touted as ‘the first sound recording.’ It’s not, really. It’s a digitized version of a phonautograph record — a 19th Century method of reproducing sound waves in visual form — which has then been sped up and warped, specifically to make it sound even creepier. Humans are wired like that; if you want to make sure that a audio file is set for maximum levels of unsettling, make sure that it sounds like it’s being sung by a small child. And in this case you want it set for maximum levels of unsettling, because the more outre the sound file is then the less attention that people will spend on the phonautograph’s creator. In this case, one Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.
And who is Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville? Good question. In this case, he was a 19th Century French printer and bookseller with a curiously obscure history. Reading between the lines of what public record information is available at this point, even a mundane researcher would concede that Scott was a bit of an esotericist; the man worked on a theory involving names, languages, and protean personality traits that uncannily foreshadowed both General Semantics, and post-Soviet Gematria.
And here we are, back-ended into applied metaphysics after all; Scott’s phonautographs are actually recordings of spells. “Aklare Delal Une,” for example? It’s the second part of a five part magic ritual that can be used to either banish, or encourage, fungal infections in grapevines. It sounds like “Au claire de la lune” because it’s not the actual phonemes that matter; magic spells are purely about pitch, tone, timing, and intent. That’s what Scott was trying to recreate — which is why he never cared about playing the recordings back — and that’s why nobody ever really went anywhere with his work. Well, at least in public. In private they’ve been refining the phonautograph for a century.
Two questions usually pop up, at this point:
- And who are “They?” Well, the people who can do magic, of course. And they find that it’s much easier to do magic when the rest of the world is subtly encouraged to find creepy and discovered examples of the Art. Which is why such an elaborate hoax.
- But the information’s still out there? But of course. Where else are they going to find new magical recruits? There’s no such thing as a secret wizarding school, you know. That’s just more disinformation, just so that you won’t look too closely at fast food restaurants — Whoops! Sorry, that’s too much Hidden Lore revealed for one session.