University of Pennsylvania  Department of Music Co-sponsored by the Department for Germanic Languages and Literatures 
present a talk by
Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton University)
Thursday, 21 February Music Building, Room 102 5.15pm Reception to follow

Decades prior to the advent of magnetic tape, a widespread culture of home-made, private audio recordings on gramophone records proliferated throughout Europe and the Americas. One of the most popular aspects of this largely-ignored chapter of media history was phonopost --the recording of spoken letters that were then sent through the mail. While already envisaged by Thomas Edison at the dawn of phonography in 1877, audio epistolary practice really took on sociologically significant dimensions with the advent of the flat (and thus more postally appropriate) gramophone record at the beginning of the 20th-century. From the late 1920s until well into the 1960s, people all over the world were recording and sending each other small gramophonic missives.  What did they sound like? What did they look like? Why is this widespread practice so unknown today? What happens to the letter when it is spoken rather than written?  These and other questions will be explored in a lecture that will sketch a provisional media archaeology of this ur-voice mail and will present some highlights of the extensive international collection of these neglected acoustic artifacts which forms the basis of what is the first state-of-the art online audio-visual archive devoted to this sonic curiosity.