| Abstract | Until the twentieth century, fundamental discoveries of electricity were experienced and articulated by integrating the living and dead flesh of human and other animal bodies into electrical circuits. Examples of this include Watson’s flying boy capacitors, Galvani's frog motors, Franklin’s batteries, Volta's pile, Pages' inductors, Meucci’s telephone and Gray’s musical telegraph. Public demonstrations of electrified bodies were largely abandoned in the early 1900’s as electrical engineering professionalized, power levels increased, electrocutions terrified, and doctors prohibited. The production of electrosomatophones, musical instruments that incorporate electricity in human bodies for sound production, was not slowed by the establishment of this taboo against direct human contact with the “electrical fire”, but the taboo did induce a significant change in practice: a shift away from direct current flows through bodies to electrical field modulations of the body–as typified by the Theremin of 1920 and musical instrument “apps” that use the touch screens of today’s mobile telephones. Visceral experience of electricity is attenuated by this move to very low currents and electric field interactions. The resulting mystification profoundly reconfigured and conditioned embodied and encultured knowledge of electricity. These changes will be critically examined by surveying the practice and discourse of the last 300 years of electrosomatophone development including the Denis d’or of Václav Prokop Diviš in 1748, Gray’s devices of the late 1800’s, Theremin in the early 1900’s, Eremeeff, Trautwein, Lertes, Heller in the 1930’s, Le Caine in the 1950’s, Michel Waisvisz and Don Buchla in the 1960’s, Salvatori Martirano and the Circuit Benders in the 1970’s, and Smule Inc. in this decade. |
