At first, Edison thought of his invention almost exclusively as a dictation device to be used by businessmen and seemed "almost oblivious to the possibility that the phonograph might record music, and thereby serve as a kind of prosthetic ear" (Lastra 22). "To what uses such a machine could best be put and what form it would take in serving them," writes William Kenney in a discussion of the phonograph's invention, "remained open questions whose answers emerged from the pressure of cultural and economic forces on the basic principles of sound recording and replay” (44). Sterne formulates a similar idea: "To study technologies in any meaningful sense requires a rich sense of their connection with human practice, habitat, and habit" (8)

Discovering these connections to practice and habit requires turning to the written word. “I assume the importance of proximate verbal discourses to an adequate understanding of the technical media," writes Lastra, "simply because they provide some of the few available traces of otherwise ephemeral phenomenon like practices of representation and reception” (60). Friedrich Kittler, describing his own Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, writes that it "collects, comments upon, and relays passages and texts that show how the novelty of technological media inscribed itself into the old paper of books" (xl). 

All of these figures have done invaluable work in excavating many of the aspects involved in the process of the phonograph's reception, but they have done so only in a context largely restricted to England, France, Germany and the United States. Such a focus is, in some sense, only natural given that these were the sites where many of the most influential sound recording technologies were invented, yet it is understandably incapable of telling the whole story. Working with digital materials that allow for easier navigation of large amounts of material, I will pursue a similar exploration that concentrates on the Spanish-speaking world.