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

Episode Date: August 27, 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. Thomas Levin explains how he searches through online auctions and flea markets to uncover these voices from the past, and what we can learn from them.

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I'm Susan Ormiston, and this is the current podcast. Imagine you were an American soldier stationed in Virginia around the time of the Second World War. You were 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. The U.S.O. is down here and there, folks. So I decided I'd give you a chance to hear my happy voice once more before we sail 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 the Panama. The sound of that soldier's happy voice was recorded and then pressed onto a record on the spot. He could then pop it in an envelope and send it in the mail back to family and friends. It's kind of like an early voice note, like the kind we send multiple times a day now via text message. And it turns out that this mode of communication was a lot more common back then than most of us realize. People could use these recording booths at 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 a top of the Empire State Building in New York. The main the top of us up in New World. No, you're wearing the world. I'm sorry to hear of Miss Marie Henderson. Say something. Canadians also had access to these recording devices.

Here's a message recording in Toronto in 1960. Hello, Mama, Dave. Well, this is Cheryl. I just thought I'd make a record to a surprise. I'm at the Canadian National Exhibition now with Dave and Charles and his frame 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. How sweet is that? In fact, people all around the world sent messages in all different languages. A bit of you and the labrimes surge to annoy our

beautiful nights of the world in the France, your face has a pain

to give courage like the mass of the grand vee. A bit scratchy, but the

reason we can hear all those recordings from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s,

is thanks to Princeton University professor and media historian Thomas Levine. He's the creator of

the world's only archive of these voice letters. Matt Galloway spoke with Thomas Levine in May. Here's their conversation. 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 discs 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, and out would 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. 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. I mean, 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 text. a phono post 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 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, do 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 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, 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. 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 prompt. 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. It'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 have you. This is from a man named Buzz, recorded at a U.S. O'Crumb. Hello, Mary.

This is Buzz Bean. We're just loafing around as usual and decided to make use of this little gadgets 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. You know that feeling when you reach the end of a really good true crime series? You want to know more, more about the people involved, where the case is now, and what it's like behind the scenes.

I get that. I'm Kathleen Goldhar and on my podcast, Crime Story, I speak with the leading storytellers of true crime to dig deeper into the cases we all just can't stop thinking about. Find crime story wherever you get your podcast. 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 we 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,

um, raise 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, uh, 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, uh, 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 Melbourne. Happy birthday to you. Hello, Mildreda. 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? 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, Milger. Thank you, dear. We only have ten seconds to go. Goodbye, everybody. You know why he's so smart it says. Warning, 10 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, et cetera, et cetera. What's, of course, extraordinary as well is 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 what 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, I'm 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 grammar, 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 television, phone. 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 addicts, 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 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 voice. 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 permissions 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 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 of media and cultural theory at Princeton University. He and Mount Galloway spoke in May. You've been listening to the current podcast. I'm Susan Ormiston. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.