In the 18th Egyptian dynasty, a colossal statue of Memnon, a mythic Ethiopian king, was erected at Thebes. It was carved in stone and equipped with hidden resonating air chambers. According to legend, when the sun rose, the statue spoke, greeting Memnon's mother, the Goddess of the Dawn.
The sound may have been caused by wind blowing over the statue's hollows and making them resonate like enormous pan pipes. Or another mechanism may have been at work that relied on the resonating voices of birds or air currents caused by warming sunlight. Whatever the technology, this towering statue in the second millennium B.C. may have been the first machine made to imitate nature's sounds.
But it was far from the last. The urge to create such machines has been a human obsession. Even the modern world has versions of Memnonic statues, though they require different kinds of materials. In the last 60 years engineers have designed transistors, vacuum tubes, speaker cones, vibrating ribbons, digital to analog converters, diamond styli and amplifiers to make it seem as if a platter of spinning vinyl or pitted aluminum is producing the natural sounds of voices and instruments.
Modern concert halls are Memnonic as well, designed by computer, fitted with exotic woods or high-tech materials, sometimes equipped with movable acoustic panels -- all to make it seem as if the hall itself isn't really there at all, that nothing is intruding between natural sound and the ear. Even movie theaters, the most unnatural of indoor settings, are wired so the listener can feel immersed in the sonic universe of the screen.
The ambition to create such machines and enclosures has its own unexplored cultural history. These are not mere entertainments; they reveal how a culture thinks about itself and its relationship to the natural world. Such objects typically show off their elaborate inventiveness. They are imposing monuments, intricate contraptions, testifying to the power of their creators. But at the same time, the ambition is to make that artifice disappear. The machine, if it is a success, should become transparent; behind the apparatus -- the stereo system, the concert hall, the movie soundtrack -- the sound of the natural world should be revealed.
But in recent years, ideas of nature have changed. There are times when the sonic goal has become an inversion of what it once was: the intent is not to replicate nature but to invert it. Sounds are synthesized that have no natural counterparts; and popular musical styles, ranging from punk to rap, make aggressive, unsettling declarations of sonic cultural independence.
How did this change take place? The turning point may have been Edison's invention of the phonograph, which was originally intended to reproduce the human voice. (Edison saw it as a business tool.)
The voice has always offered the greatest temptation and posed the greatest challenge. In 1649, for example, one fantasist imagined a book that could be carried in pockets and outfitted with gears and springs like a music box. It would be ''a book made wholly for the ears and not the eye'': upon opening, the book would ''play,'' reading itself aloud with a human voice. That fantasy wasn't fulfilled until the invention of the Walkman.
There were attempts to build speaking machines as well. In 1860 an inventor in Vienna created an automaton with flexible rubber lips and a rubber tongue. In its throat was a turning wheel used to create rolling r's. An ivory reed served as its vocal cords; the mouth changed its size in response to a controlling keyboard. A classic history of the phonograph, ''From Tin Foil to Stereo'' by Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, noted that that the automaton also had a tube ''attached to its nose when it speaks French.''
The automaton could not have sounded much like a human, but who could have expected it of Edison's invention either? The distance between nature (the sound of the voice) and artifice (the traces of vibrations in soft metal) could not have been greater. But the result was revelatory: Scientific American hailed Edison's sensational achievement of bringing to life ''the familiar voices of the dead.'' Early listeners insisted that there were no differences between the phonograph and natural sound. Edison claimed his phonograph had no intrinsic tone; it simply revealed what was there.
Using a special ''concert phonograph'' with a large horn projecting the sound, concerts were staged to promote the new invention, challenging listeners to separate the real from the Memorex. In 1915 the contralto Christine Miller accompanied a recording of her voice, occasionally stopping to let the recording play alone: ''It was impossible to distinguish between my own voice,'' she wrote, ''and Mr. Edison's recreation of it.'' The next year a concert at Carnegie Hall was staged to prove the same thing, apparently with great success. Edison was so devoted to the realism of the sound that in later years, when he had lost much of his hearing, he would bite into the cabinet of a phonograph to try to sense whether each instrument was being properly recorded.