At a time when women faced restrictions in many aspects of society (voting, higher education, jobs), a number of talented and enterprising individuals broke through gender barriers to pursue work relating to sound, in the music and science fields. Their contributions helped further audio technology and musical culture, and their dedication and perseverance is to be greatly admired. Here are three brilliant women that worked in fields relevant to sound, who you may or may not have heard of:
Sophie Germain (1776 -1831) was a French mathematician, physicist and philosopher who made major contributions to the field of acoustics. She overcame her parents’ disapproval and the barring of women from attending higher education to study mathematics by secretly reading books from her father’s library and using the name of a male former student to submit assignments at the university, until a faculty member recognised her talent and agreed to mentor her. Despite the lack of opportunities for women, she worked independently and made significant contributions to number theory and the theory of elasticity. She won a major prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the patterns produced by sound vibration, which was fundamental to the study of acoustics. Her biographers state that “all the evidence argues that Sophie Germain had a mathematical brilliance that never reached fruition due to a lack of rigorous training available only to men.”
Megan Watts Hughes (also known as Margaret) (1842 – 1907) was a Welsh singer, songwriter, scientist and philanthropist who invented a device to record sound visually. After finding success singing on the local concert circuit, she went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music but was later forced to abandon her studies due to ill-health. She invented a device to visualize sound called an “eidophone”, which consisted of a mouthpiece leading to a chamber over which was stretched a rubber membrane. She would sprinkle a variety of powders onto its surface, then sing into it to see what geometric patterns were formed from the resonance of the voice. She went on to publish the book The Eidophone; Voice Figures: Geometrical and Natural Forms Produced by Vibrations of the Human Voice.
Frances Theresa Densmore (1867 – 1957) was an American ethnomusicologist and music teacher. As a child she would listen to the singing and drumming of the Dakota people across the river as she lay in bed at night. She studied music at Oberlin College and Harvard, and inspired by ethnologist Alice Fletcher’s work, she went on to study Native American music. She worked with Native Americans around the United States, learning, recording and documenting their music and customs and helping to preserve their musical culture at a time when government policies were trying to erase Native American customs. She began working for the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. While she struggled at times in a field dominated by men, over her 50 year career Densmore wrote 20 books and collected over 2500 audio recordings of 30 different tribes using a Columbia Graphophone wax cylinder recorder. Her recordings are now held by the Library of Congress.
Sources:
- https://www.wiley.com/en-us/network/research-libraries/libraries-archives-databases/archives/sophie-germain-the-woman-who-began-her-career-using-a-mans-name
- https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Germain/
- https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/picturing-a-voice-margaret-watts-hughes-and-the-eidophone/
- https://a-desk.org/en/magazine/margaret-watts-hughes-vibratos-of-a-future/
- https://www.lakotasongs.com/densmore
- https://www.mnopedia.org/person/densmore-frances-1867-1957