Early attempts at capturing "natural" sound could be crudely summarised as a history of speaking loudly and steadily into apertures and tubes, with perhaps the odd song to lighten the mood. However, these acts of capture were rarely understood as creative in and of themselves. The aesthetic "object" was almost always understood to be the qualities of the performed voice or instrument, as distinct from the transformative act of recording. Discussions of such media usually revolve around the concept of "fidelity", of "original" compared to "copy", but in the work of Watts Hughes we see a different kind of sound recording at play. Her capture of sound into shape never sees the final conversion back into sound that characterises more common modes of recording. There is no final playback, no "loss of fidelity" or “loss of being between original and copy", as Jonathan Sterne writes of early sound media. There is, rather (due to the one-way migration of medium), a creation of something in its own right, a transformation rooted in a profound belief in the generative, incantatory power of the voice as an ineluctably spiritual phenomenon. Given their beauty and their richness of form and intention, it could be said that Margaret Watts Hughes' extraordinary works are, despite being silent, possessed of a surfeit of being. Her Voice Figures may not sit comfortably within any of the disciplines of her day, but they nonetheless gesture toward, amongst many other things, practices that only evolved much later in sound and arts, which understand the recording process to be a transformational creative act in and of itself, rather than merely an act of "sound capture". As such they deserve to be much more widely known.