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The Everyday Life of Recorded Sound: Phonograph Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean in the Early Twentieth-Century
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.
About the Speaker
Sergio Ospina-Romero is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He is the author of three books, Dolor que canta (2017), Fonógrafos Ambulantes (2024), and Talking Machine Empires (forthcoming), as well as of several articles, book chapters, and short pieces on sound reproduction technologies, Latin American music, and jazz that have appeared in books, journals, and websites across the Americas. He has taught at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad de los Andes, and Cornell University, and is the recipient of various awards and recognitions, including a Fulbright Scholarship, Cornell University’s Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize, the Klaus P. Waschmann Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology, an honorary mention in the Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas, and the inaugural Arts and Humanities Presidential Fellowship of Indiana Univeristy. Sergio is the pianist and director of the Latin jazz quartet Palonegro and of the salsa band La salsoteca.
