Musicology Colloquium Series: The Everyday Life of Recorded Sound

Speaker: Sergio Ospina-Romero, Assistant Professor of Music, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

The circulation of sound recordings became a matter of everyday life in Latin America and the Caribbean early in the twentieth century. While the imperial operations of Victor, Columbia, Edison, Odeon, and other businesses enhanced transnational networks for the global dissemination of their merchandise, recorded sound also gained cultural currency because of their increasing relevance in all kinds of social spaces. By digging into a variety of scenarios of music consumption and into the contents of sound recordings themselves, this talk examines the uncontrolled circulation of talking machines and records in Latin America and the Caribbean at the time, showing how, ultimately, the very tenets of everyday life became increasingly and inevitably entangled with those of recorded sound.