Category: Sound Recording

• The "Phonograph" Soul Capture

  This theory held that the human voice on a phonograph record was not simply a mechanical reproduction, but a trapped or displaced soul. It emerged during the first decades after Edison’s 1877 invention, when sound recording seemed uncanny, disembodied, and difficult to explain in ordinary terms. In rural and religious settings especially, recorded speech could be interpreted not as preserved vibration, but as an imprisoned essence or spirit-double contained in the machine or the disc.