created 2025-04-08, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Echopraxia Survey of Vandal, Fake and Replica
In audio and acoustics, echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound.
The word echo derives from the Greek ἠχώ (ēchō), itself from ἦχος (ēchos), ‘sound’. Echo in Greek mythology was a mountain nymph whose ability to speak was cursed, leaving her able only to repeat the last words spoken to her.
Thought
Both succumb to duplication. Narcissus finds himself transfixed with a reflection (it’s own echo), a double. Echo may only repeat, a reflection or replica.
With this, both also communicate through proxy.
Echo was a very talkative Nymph, whom the goddess Venus admires for her voice and song. She distracted the goddess Juno for hours while her husband Jupiter had affairs with other Nymphs. One day, when Echo tricks Juno into believing that Jupiter was in the city, Juno curses Echo by making her unable to initiate a spoken sentence on her own and instead only being able to finish a sentence started by someone else. “Yet a chatterbox, had no other use of speech than she has now, that she could repeat only the last words out of many.”
She falls in love at first sight with Narcissus. During a hunt, Narcissus becomes separated from the group and calls out “is anyone there” and hears Echo repeat his words. He says, “come here” only to have the same words return to him. Finally, he shouted, “This way, we must come together.” Taking this to be a reciprocation of her love, Echo concurred ecstatically, “We must come together!”
In her delight, Echo rushed to Narcissus ready to throw her arms around her beloved. Narcissus, however, was appalled and, spurning her, exclaimed, ‘Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body.’ All Echo could whisper in reply was, ‘enjoy my body’ and having done so she fled, scorned, humiliated, and shamed.
Nemesis caused him to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water where he wasted away and died, unable to take his eyes away from the beautiful youth he did not recognise as himself. Narcissus, looking one last time into the pool uttered, “Oh marvellous boy, I loved you in vain, farewell”, Echo too chorused, “Farewell.”
When the time came for Narcissus’s funeral, people came to where he lay, but found no body. All that was left of Narcissus was the six-petalled white flower arranged around a golden center that was named after him.
Eventually, Echo, too, began to waste away. Though she was immortal, her body faded and her bones turned to stone until all that remained of Echo was the sound of her voice.