I do dimly perceive

Electro-acoustic sample wizards The Books have a new album out, and they have a Tumblr that annotates each track. “A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi” includes a sample of the Mahatma’s voice from a 1931 gramophone recording.

Mostly I think of this track as a P.S.A. Everyone should know what Gandhi’s voice sounds like; it’s timbre communicates so much regardless of what he’s saying, if we can help spread it in our small way it seems worth the 18 seconds.

Nick Zammuto goes on to compare Gandhi’s voice to Einstein’s, whose voice graces a track on the band’s second album. This comparison, and the scarcity of fair-quality recordings of Gandhi’s voice, made me realize how important our memory of an historical figure’s voice can become. Try to imagine FDR, Martin Luther King Jr, or Hitler without thinking of their voice. Yet we don’t know what Lincoln sounded like, or Napoleon, let alone Confucius or Cicero.

• Audio
• Gandhi
• History
• Music
• The Books