The Everyday Life of Recorded Sound

Abstract This chapter engages with the microhistories of recorded sound consumption in early twentieth-century Latin America and the Caribbean. By looking into the ordinary and haphazard circulations of talking machines and records—or that which escaped trade statistics—it is a study of how phonograph culture shaped the rhythms and meanings of everyday life. It was in the fissures of corporate administration where talking machine empires proved to be more powerful but also more vulnerable. The critical consideration of the everyday life of recorded sound is also an opportunity to bring forth matters of colonial resistance (or lack thereof), transculturation, and cultural autonomy. The last section of this chapter works also, in a way, as a conclusion for the book.