The Current - The early "voice notes" that give us a window into the past

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Princeton professor Thomas Levin has collected the world's only collection of 'voice letters' -- small records that could be recorded on-the-spot in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and then sent through the mail to friends and loved ones. From passionate love notes, to messages home from soldiers, to tourist diaries from world travellers...these notes allowed many people to record their voices for the first time ever. Levin explains how he searches through online auctions and flea markets to uncover these ghostly voices from the past, and what we can learn from them.

Does it feel like the busyness of life makes it impossible to find any time for yourself? I'm Annie Bender, a producer at Ideas, a podcast where we explore all kinds of ideas that shape our world. We're not a self-help podcast, but we do believe in slowing down so you can reclaim your time to enjoy award-winning storytelling. Think of ideas as self-care for the curious mind. Find and follow wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Imagine you're an American soldier stationed in Virginia around the time of the Second World War,

about to ship out to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many of these soldiers would have written letters back home, but thanks to a new kind of technology back then, some of those soldiers would have also been able to walk into a little booth and record a message on a small disc, a phonograph record. Greetings and horrible ones, you lucky people. I wanted the U.S.O. was down here and there, folks. So I decided I'd give you a chance to hear my happy voice once more before we

set up from the state. We got our order, and I guess we're leaving for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Monday sometime. We're supposed to go down to Texas and then to Panama. But the admiralty seemed to change their mind. The sound of that soldier's voice was recorded, then pressed onto a record on the spot. He would then pop it into an envelope and send it in the mail back to family or friends. It's kind of like an early voice note, like the kind we send via text message these days. And it turns out this mode of communication was a lot more common than most of us now realize.

People could use those recording booths, tourist spots like the Empire State Building in New York, and send a report back about their travels. My name is Pope R. Barrett. And we are the top of the Empire State. building in New York City, famous tablet of the world. Canadians also had access to these recording devices. Here's a message recorded in Toronto in 1960. Hello, Mom and Dad.

Well, this is Cheryl. I just thought I'd make a record for a surprise. I'm at the Canadian National Exhibition now with Dave and Charles and his friend Bob. And we've been looking at the automobiles and the engineering. And we're just going to go up the Medway now and look at a few more. I'm doing fine at work and I'm quite happy here. And you've no need to worry. Dave and I are going to the opera later on to see the marriage and Othello.

And I'll write and let you know all about that. In fact, people all around the world set messages in all different languages. The reason are the reason The reason we can hear all these 30s, 40s and 50s, is thanks to Princeton University Professor and Media Historian Thomas Levine.

He is the creator of the world's only archive of these voice letters. Thomas Levine joins us now from Princeton New Jersey. Thomas, good morning. Good morning. Tell me more about this. These are fascinating recordings, and there are actual vinyl records that were pressed up in a booth. The material of these records varies greatly. Some of the

early ones are made of aluminum. Some of the others are made of various kinds of cardboard vinyl hybrids. The important double quality that these disks had to have was that they needed to be light to be able to be sent through the mail. They needed to be robust enough so that during that postal travel, they wouldn't get damaged.

But they also needed to be soft enough so that during the recording process, which was a kind of engraving, a kind of cutting away of the surface, of the smooth surface of the blank disk, they would be soft enough for the needle to actually cut the recording as the people spoke. And you would just go into a booth and insert your money. into the machine and then you could record your thoughts? You would do this in a booth. If you were of a certain cultural status, you could maybe have such a machine at home. And yes, you would just, it was available to everyone

and you could simply record up to two to three minutes depending on the speed of the recording, an outward come a record, and for a few cents more, an envelope that you could use to send it. through the mail. How common were these machines? Remarkably widespread. You would find them all over the United States, all over Canada, South America, Europe. What's astonishing is that this was a major form of audio communication that is completely

forgotten, overlooked unknown. It sounds remarkable. I mean, it's this window into the past that I think a lot of people would not know about it. And the thing is, you record it and then you would send it off and people would have the technology at home to be able to play these messages. That is precisely what made this particular form of voicemail, and there were others, so successful, because having recorded this gramophone record, wherever you did, you would send it home, and by the 1930s and 40s, most people had a gramophone player in their living room, and thus needed no special technology to play it back. It's fascinating that you call it voicemail.

We use that phrase. I'm going to leave you a voicemail, or I would leave you a voicemail on the phone. But this is actually voices sent through the mail. This is literally voicemail. And indeed, one of the ways I did research on this was to look at postal archives because for voices to be sent through the mail, there had to be a special tariff, a phonopost tariff. So, in fact, in 1939, at the major convention of the International Postal Union in Buenos Aires, Argentina, they agreed on this tariff, which is in a certain sense what made it possible to send a record cheap enough.

It wasn't any longer tariffed as a package, but now had a special letter-like postal tariff. How did you get interested in this? Again, a lot of people will just be learning about this for the very first time. I had no idea about this until I stumbled upon one of these voice letter discs at a flea market. And as a media theorist, I was curious and purchased it and started to do research and discovered to my astonishment that there was no literature, there was no archive. It had basically gone unnoticed. And I thought, this is very curious.

I wonder, are there many of these? And so I started looking around at flea markets on eBay, that full. flea market with metadata, and at auctions, and slowly began to amass what has become a rather substantial collection of such gramophonic voice letters. Describe your substantial collection. It is now close to 5,000 discs, stuffing every filing cabinet and niche of my Princeton office. many of them have been digitized and transcribed and are online. They stem from all parts of the world. Some of my first are indeed from Argentina, where, by the way, an entirely different structure was in place.

There, due not least due to the fact that there's very limited, there was still rather limited amount of literacy, the voice letters could be recorded at the post office, which was a state service, and then sent to somewhere in the north of Argentina, where your cousin could receive it and play the record at the post office. I spent a couple of hours yesterday on your online archive going through some of these

and just listening to them. And what's amazing is that there is a huge swath of, and we heard a little bit of that introduction, just this huge range of, of types of messages that people were sending around. How would you describe kind of the broad categories that these recordings would fall into? Some were news of my travels. Some were love letters.

Some were I really miss home. Some were, look what a strange thing we just stumbled upon. We're going to try out and see what it means to be recording ourselves. Some were fascination with the possibility that my voice. voice too could sound like a voice on the radio. Some were attempts to archive thoughts for a future, be it for a child who was still young or for a loved one who was absent. The remarkable range also of abilities to speak spontaneously. Some people were very nervous that they wouldn't know what to say, and that's true. Once this recording starts, you have to realize, it never

stops. There's no post-production, there's no editing, so it will record silence if you don't have anything to say. Some people would be so nervous that they would write out what they wanted to say, and so you hear, sometimes rather wooden, reading of a voicem letter, even though some people had incredible skills at spontaneous speaking and would compose the most eloquent and beautifully articulated voice letters without any problem. And sometimes there would be great passion in what people will record. I want to play one of those love letters. Have a listen to this.

Please. Baby, Keiko, honey, I want to see you real bad. It really hurts me to be away from you like I am. At night, I can't sleep. I dream about you. I say your name of my sleep. Oh, gee, I miss you terrible, Keiko. And I really love you.

I want to come to Pan as soon as possible and marry you. That's remarkable. He's incredibly intimate to record and then send off. through the mail. Is that typical in terms of the tone of some of these messages? There's a huge variety of messages. This one is representative of

a certain kind of intimacy. That kind of intimacy was often problematized by the fact that remember, the gramophone in the 1930s and 40s was most often located in the living room. That meant that when you played it back,

you could not be guaranteed that it would only be heard by the loved recipient. So often what you find is hilarious forms of euphemism. Oh, my dear, I miss you so much. Oh, you know what I'm thinking because it had to be, you know, G-rated because the whole family would most likely be listening to this strange media object that had just arrived in the mail. We were saying earlier that a lot of these came from people who were posted abroad,

perhaps serving in the military or what happened. have you. This is from a man named Buzz, recorded at a U.S. O'Crum. Hello, Mary. This is Buzz Bean. We're just loafing around as usual and decided to make use of this little gadget that they have here. I thought you could get a better idea of my voice this way than if I described it to you by mail. One good thing about the recording, you see, is if you don't like it, you can turn the darn thing off. That's something that can't happen when I'm there in person. Boy, I love to talk. Prime Minister Mark Carney has finally secured a majority for this liberal government.

What are his plans and how does it all affect you? The Power and Politics Podcast answers these questions and more six days a week. We have you covered from all angles. Our reporter roundtable joins us every Friday and you can get caught up with the weekly wrap every Saturday. Follow and listen to Power and Politics wherever you get your podcasts. How novel was the experience back then? of people actually recording their voice and then hearing it back. I just love this recording that you've chosen

because it's such a beautiful example of what one could call vernacular media theory. It's somebody reflecting on the fact of the recorded voice and how different it is from the live voice, how different it is from the letter. These are all really interesting questions that this kind of voice, gramophonic voice recorded letter,

raised for a media theory, right? For many people, this was the first time they were encountering the possibility of recording themselves. And so they imagined the kind of voices they had heard previously as recorded voices on the radio and other kinds of voices that involved being physically absent when your voice is heard, such as telephony. But what's striking about the particular version of... recorded voice messages that you have coming from military bases is that, remember, during war,

correspondence is censored. How do you censor a voice letter? Well, you have an operator who's standing next to you operating the recording machinery, unlike in the booth where it's completely automatic. So in fact, you have proximate hearing. Somebody is next to you listening to what you're saying. This makes the fact of intimate letters from soldiers at army bases, even more extraordinary.

We're going to play one more message. This was recorded in 1951 in a beachside motel at a booth in this motel in San Francisco, California. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Melrose. Happy birthday to you.

Hello, Milgrina. How do you like your 32nd birthday? party. Oh, I just think it's terrific. Just wonderful. Well, you know we're at Roberts at the beach? And it's March 17, 1951. It's full of information, aren't you? There are two and a half people on this booth tonight. Very day, very funny. Happy birthday, miletus. Thank you, dear. We only have ten seconds to go. Goodbye, everybody. You know why he's so smart it says. Warning, ten seconds to go. recording in 10 seconds.

Once again, goodbye, everybody. They had to fill up the final 10 seconds. If you last 10 seconds go to waste, there would be things you couldn't record. What is it like? Part of this is listening back to the past, right? These are people who they recorded that in 1951 are presumably long gone.

And now you're listening back in some ways to this moment. It's different than looking at a photograph in some ways. It is both different and yet. deeply similar because, like the photograph, it evokes a present. It evokes a powerful sense of the person that is really quite extraordinary, in which many people comment on when listening to voices of their loved ones, in previous moments, etc., etc. What's, of course, extraordinary as well as that when you have such a recording, it reveals many different things. One of the groups of scholars that are particularly interested in my archive are historical

linguists because you have examples of utterance, of vocabulary, of ways of speaking that may not have been recorded or have otherwise been registered for posterity. But you're absolutely right. what I have created is, in an important sense, a ghost archive, an archive of the voices of the dead. And because the voice is so often linked to the living body, the breathing body, the fact that there is a physical presence right there producing that voice, it makes these voices at once deeply powerful and deeply uncanny, deeply strange and deeply magical. This is something that we take for granted now.

I was saying earlier about voicemail. Many of us don't leave voicemail anymore because you can just send a text message or have you. But we have seen the eruption of people leaving voice memos. So you record a voice memo on your phone and you text it to somebody instead of leaving the voice memo. This was that decades and decades ago. What do we learn about the power of the human voice in some ways by listening to this? In an important sense, media archaeology. which is the kind of work that I do and which this is an exemplar of, is a way to help us understand our present media environment by looking at aspects of a prior media environment that is at once very similar and very different.

What we have a very good sense of in listening to these letters, in listening to these voices, is how magical, how strange, how unusual the fact of hearing a voice separate from the human body can be. We do take it for granted. I have students who listen to their particularly parental voice messages at 1.5 or 2.0, reducing them to kind of information theoretical objects rather than appreciating the extraordinary fact of a voice emanating from a device that you're holding in your hand. So, yes, I often when I'm listening to these kinds of recordings, am reminded of how particularly precious the expression of longing and desire and wonder

can be when articulated by somebody recording their voice. I also just can't quite imagine what it would have been like in 1951 or earlier to get something like this in the mail, that you have somebody who is on the other side of the world that you miss and you could read a letter but that's one thing. But then you hear their voice coming out of the gramophone in the middle of the living room as you said.

It's very important to remember that telephone calls, which we also take for granted now, were then still a novel, relative novelty, were very expensive and this is something that our current cellular telephony

completely occludes. today we no longer tariff telephone calls by distance. In the 1940s and 50s, when you made a phone call from San Francisco to New York, it was a much more expensive affair than phoning from San Francisco to Los Angeles. So many of these letters, particularly when they're domestic American letters, go transcontinental because for a few cents, 50 cents, 75 cents, you could send three minutes of your voice, whereas the same phone call, if it could be organized, and it was often a complicated matter, would be much more expensive.

So there was an economic dimension to it, but of course also unlike the telephone, this is a phone call, this is a voice from afar that you can repeat again and again. And many of the recordings in my archive that sound less pristine than others, may well have been due to this decay of the recording quality may well have been due to the fact that they were played over and over again. When did people stop sending voicemails? People never stopped sending voicemails. They only started doing it on different platforms.

So in the 50s, various forms of magnetic recording on first, steel wire. Yes, there were wire recordings, and then reel-to-reel tape, and then, of course, audio cassettes began to displace the gramophone record, not least because, unlike the gramophone record as a voicemail carrier, these new platforms allowed for erasing, editing, re-recording. And so they're in a certain sense an entirely different animal. But as I mentioned, these booths existed all over the world, including here in Canada as well. So presumably there are at flea markets and yard sales and buried in basements and attics. There must be these sorts of recordings here as well in Canada.

I very much am convinced of that. I'm constantly finding them every single day on eBay and other such black people. platforms all over the world. I would urge your readers to keep an eye out for them, send them to me. I'm always interested, or at least preserve them for the families. Because one of the most extraordinary things that I encounter is people on eBay selling the voices of their relatives and, you know, saying, oh, this is my grandfather when he recorded this for my grandmother during their courtship. And I write to them. I say, look, are you really selling the voice of your grandfather? And the answer is often, yes.

I am because I don't have a gramophone, I can't play it. I say, okay, look, sell it to me. I will digitize it and send you an MP3 that you can share with your family. And if you like, I can put it online. And when I put it online, the people who own it can determine very carefully how much access there is. If they say, I only want my family to have access to it, or only scholars, or it's fine, everybody can listen to it. The archive has a very granular permission's logic that allows me to customize that to whatever the people whose records I have digitized would prefer. And so a collector is always collecting.

Presumably your archive will continue to grow and grow and grow. A collector is always collecting. It could not have said it better. Yes. Thomas, this is fascinating. It's just really neat to hear these snippets of the past, but the story behind how they were recorded and sent around and what they meant to people is also really quite something.

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thomas Levine is a professor at Princeton University. He teaches media and cultural theory. If you think you might have one of those old voiceless recordings lurking in a box in the basement or the attic, the professor and his archive would love to hear from you. You can email them, phono post, P-H-O-N-O-Post at Princeton.edu. And you can listen to some of these old recordings online. Just go to phono-hyphen post.

You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca slash podcasts.