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 music commodities, recorded sound also gained cultural currency because of its 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 haphazard circulation of talking machines and records in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1877 and 1925, showing how, ultimately, the very tenets of everyday life became increasingly and inevitably entangled with those of recorded sound.

Presented by the Department of Musicology; free and open to the public.

GUEST SPEAKER BIO

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), La conquista discográfica de América Latina (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 University. Sergio is the pianist and director of the Latin jazz quartet Palonegro and of the salsa band La salsoteca.