Although mostly forgotten today, nickel-in-the-slot phonographs were a popular and telling symptom of acoustic modernity around 1890. At the rate of a minute or two of recorded sound per nickel deposited, these machines paved the way for the widespread private ownership of phonographs by pioneering their use a public venue where the uncanny experience of listening to absent voices was standardized by the logics of exchange and exhibition. The sound of money falling into the slots was answered automatically by the siren’s call of a voice with no speaker, calling for more money to be deposited. Because they flickered briefly at a conjunction of publics and markets, automatic phonographs provide a way to parse some of the conflicts attending the money economy during the 1890s, that crucial decade in the establishment of modernity as a technological way of life. Canning popular music, and privatizing its audition in serial acts of consumption, these devices were instrumental in the progressive abstraction of public space. Considering both the design and contexts of use of the devices helps to illuminate the conflicted subjectivities of markets and publics in the fin de siècle.
Money Economy in Medieval Japan. A Study in the Use of Coins.
