The Sound Machine

by

Roald Dahl

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The Sound Machine Quotes

It was a warm summer evening and Klausner walked quickly through the front gate and around the side of the house and into the garden at the back. He went on down the garden until he came to a wooden shed and he unlocked the door, went inside and closed the door behind him. The interior of the shed was an unpainted room. Against one wall, on the left, there was a long wooden workbench, and on it, among a littering of wires and batteries and small sharp tools, there stood a black box about three feet long, the shape of a child's coffin.

Related Characters: Klausner
Related Symbols: The Machine
Page Number: 40
Explanation and Analysis:

All the while he kept speaking softly to himself, nodding his head, smiling sometimes, his hands always moving, the fingers moving swiftly, deftly, inside the box, his mouth twisting into curious shapes when a thing was delicate or difficult to do, saying, “Yes…Yes…And now this one…Yes…Yes…But is this right? Is it—where's my diagram?…Ah, yes…Of course…Yes, yes…That's right…And now…Good…Good…Yes…Yes, yes, yes.” His concentration was intense; his movements were quick; there was an air of urgency about the way he worked, of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement.

Related Characters: Klausner (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Machine
Page Number: 40
Explanation and Analysis:

“It’s just an idea.”

Related Characters: Klausner (speaker), The Doctor / Scott
Related Symbols: The Machine
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:

“Well, speaking very roughly, any note so high that it has more than fifteen thousand vibrations a second—we can't hear it. Dogs have better ears than us. You know you can buy a whistle whose note is so high-pitched that you can't hear it at all. But a dog can hear it.”

“Yes, I've seen one,” the Doctor said.

“Of course you have. And up the scale, higher than the note of that whistle, there is another note—a vibration if you like, but I prefer to think of it as a note. You can't hear that one either. And above that there is another and another rising right up the scale forever and ever and ever, an endless succession of notes…an infinity of notes…there is a note—if only our ears could hear it—so high that it vibrates a million times a second…and another a million times as high as that…and on and on, higher and higher, as far as numbers go, which is…infinity…eternity…beyond the stars.”

Related Characters: Klausner (speaker), The Doctor / Scott (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Machine
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

Klausner was becoming more animated every moment. He was a small frail man, nervous and twitchy, with always moving hands. His large head inclined toward his left shoulder as though his neck sere not quite strong enough to support it rigidly. His face was smooth and pale, almost white, and the pale grey eyes that blinked and peered from behind a pair of steel spectacles were bewildered, unfocussed, remote. He was a frail, nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man, dreamy and distracted; suddenly fluttering and animated; and now the Doctor, looking at that strange pale face and those pale grey eyes, felt that somehow there was about this little person a quality of distance, of immense, immeasurable distance, as though the mind were far away from where the body was.

Related Characters: Klausner, The Doctor / Scott
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

“I believe,” he said, speaking more slowly now, “that there is a whole world of sound about us all the time that we cannot hear. It is possible that up there in those high-pitched inaudible regions there is a new exciting music being made, with subtle harmonies and fierce grinding discords, a music so powerful that it would drive us mad if only our ears were tuned to hear the sound of it. There may be anything…for all we know there may—"

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “But it's not very probable.”

“Why not? Why not?” Klausner pointed to a fly sitting on a small roll of copper wire on the workbench. “You see that fly? What sort of a noise is that fly making now? None that one can hear. But for all we know the creature may be whistling like mad on a very high note, or barking or croaking or singing a song. It's got a mouth, hasn't it? It's got a throat!”

Related Characters: Klausner (speaker), The Doctor / Scott (speaker)
Page Number: 42-43
Explanation and Analysis:

He plugged the wire connections from the earphones into the machine and put the earphones over his ears. The movement of his hands were quick and precise. He was excited, and breathed loudly and quickly through his mouth. He kept on talking to himself with little words of comfort and encouragement, as though he were afraid—afraid that the machine might not work and afraid also of what might happen if it did. He stood there in the garden beside the wooden table, so pale, small, and thin that he looked like an ancient, consumptive, bespectacled child. […] As he listened, he became conscious of a curious sensation, a feeling that his ears were stretching out away from his head, that each ear was connected to his head by a thin stiff wire, like a tentacle, and that the wires were lengthening, that the ears were going up and up toward a secret and forbidden territory, a dangerous ultrasonic region where ears had never been before and had no right to be.

Related Characters: Klausner
Related Symbols: The Machine
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:

From the moment that he started pulling to the moment when the stem broke, he heard—he distinctly heard in the earphones—a faint high-pitched cry, curiously inanimate. He took another daisy and did it again. Once more he heard the cry, but he wasn't so sure now that it expressed pain. No, it wasn't pain; it was surprise. Or was it? It didn't really express any of the feelings or emotions known to a human being. It was just a cry, a neutral, stony cry—a single emotionless note, expressing nothing. It had been the same with the roses. He had been wrong in calling it a cry of pain. A flower probably didn’t feel pain. It felt something else which we didn't know about—something called toin or spud or plinuckment, or anything you like.

Related Characters: Klausner
Related Symbols: The Machine
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:

He tried to remember what the shriek of the tree had sounded like, but he couldn’t. He could remember only that it had been enormous and frightful and that it had made him feel sick with horror. He tried to imagine what sort of noise a human would make if he had to stand anchored to the ground while someone deliberately swung a small sharp thing at his leg so that the blade cut in deep and wedged itself in the cut. Same sort of noise perhaps? No. Quite different. The noise of the tree was worse than any known human noise because of that frightening, toneless, throatless quality. He began to wonder about other living things, and he thought immediately of a field of wheat, a field of wheat standing up straight and yellow and alive, with the mower going through it, cutting the stems, five hundred stems a second, every second. Oh, my God, what would that sound be like? […] no, he thought. I do not want to go to a wheat field with my machine. I would never eat bread after that.

Related Characters: Klausner (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Machine
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:
No matches.