Bringing audible propaganda into the everyday
Résumé
This chapter focuses on one episode of the use of sound in a workers’ resistance movement is itself an example of this development. Most of the usages Edison envisaged were centred on conversation and reproducing the human voice, and were not for entertainment purposes. Just six months later, in France, Pierre Giffard came up with ideas related to the political usages of recorded sound: For official speeches by the head of state, for any proclamation by the government, instead of turning to the Imprimerie Nationale to print the speech, it will suffice to have it reproduced by galvanoplasty and dispatched to all the towns, equipped in advance with a verified official phonograph. It was in 1929 that records took their full place in this technological and political shift, with the emergence of a company dedicated to this task, with a lasting catalogue of records produced by them and structured as a series.
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