Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

T
here seems to be some confusion regarding
the early history of the painting: if it was
made while Nipper, the dog, was still alive; if
it is based or not on a photograph; what was
Barraud’s initial plan; what was the phonograph,
then replaced by a gramophone, supposedly
playing, or whose idea was its final title, among
others. What remains obvious, though, is the
worldwide diffusion of an image that acted and
has been used both as a brand and as an
advertisement by several companies, past and
present.
Apart from the mystery surrounding its
historical details, the legend accompanying this
domestic scene shared more or less the same
features everywhere. In fact this myth is what
fascinates me the most. As for its overall content I
feel inclined to keep the version offered by my
Spanish parents, born in the fifties, when feigning
ignorance I asked them if the phrase “la voz de
su amo” - literally, “his master’s voice”- sounded
familiar to them. Both burst out: “of course!”,
talked about records and then took turns to
explain the touching story of the dog who froze
close to a gramophone playing the voice of his
late master, seemingly recognising it and maybe
trying to make sense of what was happening.
Besides the cuteness of the little dog, it is
plausible a considerable chunk of the strength
and virality of the picture lie in the questions
pointed out by those two words, seeming and
maybe. Do dogs identify the sounds coming out
of gramophones as someone’s voice? Many
people, common people, guided by the slightly
cocked head and their own experiences would
answer positively, stating that dogs do identify
people’s voices in recordings and react to them,
in some way or another. But are dogs able to
understand these recorded sounds as such, and
not as an actual person? To what level do they
understand what is happening? This is, in fact, a
more complex issue.
In any case, the development of devices
that recorded our audiovisual environment
prompted comparisons between our senses and
perception, and those of animals. For example,
to what degree they were tuned to each other, if
animals saw, heard and perceived as we did or
not. Recorders interposed another step between
the actual world and perception. A level which
could be easily manipulated and played with,
fabricating products, such as photographs, films
or audio-recordings, that in some circumstances
even posed as reality. But knowing what a
gramophone was and what it did, kept ourselves
aware and complicit with its secrets, and safe not
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to be fooled by the machine.
However dogs, poor little dogs, were
suspected of not being so smart. So maybe
Nipper did recognise his master’s voice, and sat
there interested, wondering, head titled to one
side. Nevertheless, apparently he never reached
any final conclusion. For what we know, he may
be puzzled by the event in the same way that he
may not recognise his own reflection on the
brass-horn, or in a mirror. This scene was a
harmless alternative to persuade about the fidelity
of the recorded sound without the risk of
offending the intelligence of the human - male?-
customers, and strengthening simultaneously their
confidence and dominant position back at
home, sweet home. Maybe this was not just a
portrait of man as master of animals and
creation. After all, one could be the master not
only of his own dog, but also of servants, children,
wife and the whole household.
The success of the main strokes of this
scheme can be validated by the existence of
recent variations, very similar although focused in
sight instead of hearing. Like two 2011 Samsung
Galaxy commercials that show a hen and a little
girl deceived by the smart-phone vivid images.
The hen, brooding the eggs in a screen, and the
girl dropping the gadget inside a goldfish bowl
trying to save a clownfish that was not really there.
There are also plenty of Internet videos with dogs
tilting their heads when faced with persons in
online video-chats. This may be possibly because
we find that charming, as well as the floppy and
genetically selected neotenic ears that may
partially cause so much tilting in order to avoid
the obstruction of the sound waves.
Beyond the puzzlement that we attribute
to the dog, there is another strong emotional
content in the painting. Is Nipper aware of what
death is? Is he mourning his beloved master?
Perhaps to feed our human pride we would feel
tempted to answer that he is, but we don’t know
for sure. On the other hand if the depicted
vignette were a scientific experiment to check if
Nipper possessed a death concept, nowadays it
probably would have been considered as
ethically unacceptable like the experiment in
which Colin Allen and Mark Hauser described and
then challenged, consisting on studying the
reaction of a female monkey when listening to a
recorded call of her dead infant. However, the
brown and white dog can be labelled as an
update of the Victorian topic of the mourning
dog. A topic also found in other times and
cultures. For instance, in Japan, where a statue
remembers Hachiko the faithful.