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Historia literaria del registro de sonido

Sam Carter, Author
Introduction, page 1 of 3
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1877: Obeso and the fonógrafo

In 1877, the 28-year-old Colombian poet Candelario Obeso published Cantos populares de mi tierra, a collection of sixteen poems written in an unconventional orthography designed to capture the popular speech of the region where he was born. “The combination of original poetry, an acute hearing inscribed in a detailed, almost illegible alternative spelling and the careful instructions given at the beginning of the book for reading the poems out loud highlight his attunement to the sound of language,” writes Ana María Ochoa Gautier in Aurality, her history of listening in nineteenth-century Colombia. By trying to make voices come alive on paper—by attempting to “imbue the lettered word with sound”—Obeso performs his own version of phonography, although it is “one of transcription rather than inscription in that it seeks to carefully document through a highly acousticized orthography, the sounds he heard, knew, and pronounced onto the page" (104). 


On the other side of the Atlantic, just two weeks before Obeso signed his dedication on May 15th, a phonography based on inscription and indexicality rather than transcription was being developed by the poet and inventor Charles Cros. Although his financial circumstances prevented him from building a functioning device, Cros still submitted plans for a fully functional sound-recording apparatus to the Académie des Sciences on April 30—nearly eight months before Edison would officially claim the title of inventor of the phonograph.    

Could access to a phonograph have changed Obeso’s work? Would he still have pursued what one might call, following Jacques Rancière, a political project of redistributing the audible through poetry, or would he have decided to bring indexical recordings rather than transcribed poems to an urban environment evidently unaware of the countryside? Engaging in such counterfactual speculation is far from helpful—and not only because the recording technology of the time was likely not sophisticated enough to capture all of the subtleties Obeso had in mind. One has only to think of the example of Nicolás Guillén, who, writing nearly fifty years later in an age of full-fledged phonography and radio, still employed strategies similar to Obeso's. 


It would be unfair, however, to suggest that literature and phonography simply talked past each other. In order to understand how the first device capable of both recording and reproducing sound came to be both used and understood, it is necessary to turn to print. Although capable of capturing the sounds surrounding them, the phonograph and subsequent sound recording and reproduction devices were notably silent regarding the history of their own reception and use. "Ironically, no phonographically recorded version of a phonograph exhibition survives," (31) writes Lisa Gitelman in Always Already New when discussing the demonstrations necessary to convince audiences that the devices not only worked but were also a worthwhile investment.
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