Attrib.

Eley Williams (2017)

I held the rib up to the microphone and opened by mouth.

‘Dvorák,’ said my neighbour’s front door. Its pronunciation was very clear. Not quite sure
who to blame for this, I narrowed my eyes at the rib.

‘His and hers?’ asked my computer’s cooling fan.

‘Lament,’ said the tree branch who chose that moment to graze my windowpane, and as if
in answer the hinges on our cat-flap downstairs said ‘Pyongyang’ in insistent tones. The fact I could
hear this all the way up in my bedroom proved to be my tipping point and I pushed the printouts of
the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling from my lap, threw the rib to the ground and fled my desk. I wedged the
swinging cat-flap shut with the second thing that came to hand (the first thing that was to hand was
the cat, whose I didn’t ask to be born look I pointedly ignored) and returned with new, incensed
resolve to my computer and its waiting microphone.

I collected my pens together in a neat line along my desktop. I collected my thoughts. I

‘Sissinghurst,’ announced my radiator in its clearest tones. ‘Sissinghurst and gourds.’

Adrenaline snarled up my spine and directly into my brain so it was in an out=of-body sleight
of keyboard strokes that I set about buying soundproofing materials from the first company that I
could find online. Scrolling down the page of options available to me with its unfamiliar
vocabularies, I reached for my phone and dialled the number.

‘Is it for a home studio?’ a nice-sounding man on customer services asked.

I explained my situation and the deadlines involved. ‘I cannot tolerate these conditions,’ I added at
the end of my speech. To fill his polite pause, I assured him that I would pay whatever figure he
quoted.

‘You might also want some baffles,’ he said as the conversation began winding down. ‘Some
sound baffle panels. They’ll absorb a lot.’ I wrote BAFFLE on the back of my Sistine Chapel printout
and underlined the word twice. The baffling material would arrive too late for today’s purposes , of

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course, but at least I could make the order and pretend that I had some semblance of control. ‘I’ve
never spoken to a Foley artist before,’ the man continued as we finished the order. He pronounced
the word Foley as it was the French word for madness.

‘Testing, testing, yes yes yes,’ I said to the microphone. The neon bars on my laptop screen
lit up and jittered accordingly. I messed around with he mouse and the EQ levels. ‘One two one
two,” I said. Staring down into it, you can see that the grille of a microphone contains endless
darknesses.

‘Three,’ I added. I lined up the pens in a slightly different order on my desk.

‘You’re – hello? – you’re still on the line,’ said a tiny voice next to my hand. I swore,
apologised, hit a button and threw my phone across the room.

‘Lament, lamently,’ said the tree branch at my windowpane.

I picked up the rib once more and turned my attention to the printouts of the Sistine Chapel.

The commission had come from a gallery and my work for it was pretty much completed,
just one task left to the last minute. The gallery was putting together an exhibition in the new year
involving huge reproductions of Michelangelo’s major works alongside archival material relating to
his life. It was a big deal and I, a small deal, had been brought on board to add incidental sounds to
the audio guides included in the ticket price. By pressing various buttons at various stages of the
tour, those who wished to – and here I consult the paperwork to check that I have the right wording
– augment their experience of the paintings and statues could access pre-recorded commentaries
from art historians and have complementary pieces of music or literature or Bible verses read to
them by actors. These snippets included some of Michelangelo’s own poetry in a new English
translation – “My bear extends heavenward; my nape falls in/fixed on my spine, and visibly my
sternum/becomes like a harp … [Insert FX: twanging]” run the lines according to me production
notes. All of these tracks would be played via discreet headsets that visitors wear and fiddle with at
their leisure as they wander past the artworks.

I am neither an actor nor an art historian. I checked the contract three times and it’s clear
that my name will not be appearing in the credits of these audio guides. Fair enough. Foley artists
are employed as surreptitious service and our anonymity seems fitting, somehow – I only ever get
work precisely because I blend in unobtrusively. If you ever hear the sound of rain on the radio or
see rain during a film, chances are that a Foley artist has spent some time sprinkling rice or sand on

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a cooking tray so that you get to experience the rainiest rain that ever rained without the sound
dominating the scene.

Those cosy TV Christmas specials or period dramas with their crackling fireplaces? That
sound will have been added in post-production and what you are actually hearing is me crouched
over a sensitive microphone and scrunching wads of baking parchment. When a character walks
through snow on screen, imagine me by a microphone stamping up and own on a thick layer of cat
litter. When that character slips and breaks their leg, the sound that causes you to wince was made
by me snapping a piece of celery in a wet tea towel.

The final recordings that that the gallery will use are recorded in the studio, a small room
filled to the brim with baffle, but I do like to trial various first drafts and experiments for specific
sounds at home. For this Michelangelo commission I had great fun yesterday trying to convey the
sound of metal ladders being pulled up from the damned as pictured in The Last Judgement and
that of angels’ long-stemmed trumpets knocking the heads of the elect. I found the right sound for
this latter action by bouncing the bowl of a ladle against the top of my IKEA wine rack. The quiet,
heavy swish of fabric that accompanies an art historian’s discussion of Michelangelo’s Pietà statue
will be made by flexing my mother’s Laura Ashley curtains between my hands.

There was one more Foley track that I had not recorded. It was one that had not been
requested – the production notes for the Creation of Eve – the production notes for the Creation of
Eve image state I should select some “Mediterranean/English garden birdsong (morning) FX” and
the sound of a river from stock audio files. I compared these notes to those complied for the
Creation of Adam painting. Visitors who hit the button when looking at the more famous painting
would literally receive all the bells and whistles. Loud gongs, clashing cymbals! Timpani and choirs!
All that plus a Tesla-coil crackle would be stuffed through the wires in the visitor’s earphones to
signify Adam and God networking on a cloud and showing each other their nipples, going in for the
first corporate handshake.

The imbalance of attention lavished between the two Creations struck me as unfair. I have a
hazy memory of the myth about the birth of Eve, that of a lonely man clutching his side in a garden
and asking that a helpmate be Deliverood unto him. As I ordered a takeaway last night and
considered for a millisecond whether I could put the cost on research, I looked up the relevant Bible
verse to check what was said as per Eve springing into being. And how has Michelangelo chosen to
show it? Perhaps God whittled fer from Adam’s rib, or perhaps He passed the rib back to the freshly

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filleted Adam to be whittled. As a test I experimented sliding a pair of chopsticks across one
another next to the microphone but the sound was too much like knitting to seem fitting for the
miracle of rib-becomes-woman.

Maybe God and Adam, wearing nothing but gardening gloves and with all the time in the
new world for navel-gazing, planted the rib in the Eden soil and she took root right there and grew
up like a shoot. Or the rib might have rolled out of Adam’s side and Mandelbrot-fractalled into
something bigger, its small curve of bone flinging out sudden rib-promontories and dendrites the
very moment that it hit the earth until it achieved the shape of a fully formed woman. What were
the presumed mechanics, and how might an understanding of them help me decide on a Foley
track? What is the Foley equivalent of a posed rhetorical question?

I dog-eared the printout of the Creation of Eve and listened to that action’s sound, the
minute noise of paper yielding to itself. I rapped my day-old, tooth-stripped #34 Char Siu takeaway
rib against the microphone and watched the levels on my computer screen jump with surprise.
Michelangelo’s Eve looks a bit like me, I thought. I wondered about the model the artist might have
used in his sketches to capture her posture. Distractedly I gnawed on the meatless rib in my hand.
She looks like someone who might chew her nails and stub her toes, like she too mistakenly
shampoos her hair twice instead of using conditioner because sometimes she neglects to check
which bottle she is using. She is painted, presumably, taking a first momentous gasp of
Mediterranean/English garden breath but her expression is not momentous. It is small and aghast.
It is the expression of someone slightly worried that they might have given the cat fleas rather than
the other way around. I turned the printout over and looked at the blank back of the page, and read
my word BAFFLE underlined twice. It was a cheap printout. You could see a faint trace of Eve’s
outline through the paper.

It is the image Eve is painted standing at Adam’s side with her arms raised, palms together
as if caught in a dance move or as if short out of a very slow, lumbersome rib-cannon. It is the
posture of one who is diving, or perhaps slightly hunched in supplication. She is playing Charades,
gamely, against her will, and her audience is having none of it. I compare my own posture at my
desk, takeaway rib between my teeth and slumped over my microphone. God is painted facing Eve
and it looks like He is giving her a noncommittal ticking-off. He gets to wear clothes but has bare
feet. Presumably Eden is turfed with comfy lawns. Adam lies looking in a tousled, sidekick slumber
to the left of the picture. He does not show any obvious signs of surgery or happy fatherhood.

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Unlike Eve and God he appears expressionless, merely tired after a day of naming things whatever
the hell he likes.

I flipped the printout over because the whiteness of the underside was scaring me. I read in
my research notes that Michelangelo once made a snowman. He sculpted it in a Florence courtyard
for one of the Medici. Blank-faced and temporary, it must have melted into priceless gutters. I
brought the printout up to my eye and saw that the paintwork was covered in spider-leg fractures. I
thought about the crack in my bedroom ceiling and about five hundred years of worshippers
looking up God’s skirts and togas, pointing out and naming their favourite saints.

I felt a growing unnamed impatience that the allotted sounds I had been tasked to provide
for this landscape – the vague birdsong and river splashings – did not seem enough of a tribute to
the scene. Not to this Eve, disribbed for his pleasure and of whom I had become fond, nor for the
sounds of unseen birth and the concept of a floating rib, the body’s hitchhikers. I wanted the
visitors int eh gallery to draw closer to this image when they listened to the suggested soundscape,
not skip this track or use it as filler for dawdle-time as they moved on to the more famous
Creation’s boom and pomp or the to-scale version of David’s contrapposto mooch. There is the
suggestion of a river’s tributary or some blue remembered hills beyond the figures. Their tableau
takes place beneath the calm-before-storm clouds of a sin-scrumping morning. I wanted to find a
sound that would stand tribute to soft paintbrushes on newborns kin and to reluctant rib-ticklers
everywhere. The more I looked at Eve’s expression, the more she seemed to be saying to her
maker, Please put me back. Or what have you done?

‘Lament,’ said the branch a third time at my window.

‘One two, one two,’ I said to check the levels. I looked a final time at the picture of the
naked couple and their clothed onlooker. I thought about the cracked plaster of my bedroom
ceiling, and the lack of my name in the production credits, and I did not feel ashamed.

Ensuring that the microphone was at the correct angle, I put my finger in my cheek, flicked
my wrist and I recorded a short, absurd pop.