Dis:connected by Wire. Music by Telephone Wires as an “Audible Infrastructure”, 1877–1930
This research project examines music delivery by telephone wires between 1877 and 1930. Before the telephone became a widespread tool of everyday conversations, music transmissions in North America and Europe demonstrated and explored the telephone’s wondrous potential of the new device. These transmissions created a specific perception mode, turned concerts and opera houses into spaces of scientific experimentation, and nurtured visions of expanding remote audiences. From 1890 on, commercial services were set up in some countries and delivered “music by wire” to people’s households and public places until these companies were shut down when radio challenged their existence in the 1920s.
Through archival research in the United States and Europe, this project investigates this phenomenon as a transnational and entangled history unfolding in different auditory cultures in an early era of globalization. It combines two analytical lenses: first, drawing on ‘audible infrastructure’ studies (Devine/Boudreault-Fournier 2021) and ‘musical infrastructure’ studies (Pestel/Rempe 2025), this project examines the connective strategies, democratizing ambitions, and infrastructural utopian imaginaries. Second, using concepts from sound studies, music listening history, and science and technology studies, it investigates how the telephone shaped music listening in different auditory cultures, redefined notions of the concert and operatic experience, and brought up liveness. Under the title “Dis:connected by wire,” these approaches are brought into conversation and tension to study different layers of disconnection and connection.
