Voice notes on vinyl records? It used to be all the rage

In 1960, a loretta young english people adult female walked into a Voice-O-Graph john wilkes booth in Toronto and recorded a one-minute sound message to mail to her parents.

“Hi Mum and Dad. Well, this is Cheryl. I just thought I'd make a record to… uh, as a surprise,” she said in the message recorded at that year’s Canadian National Exhibition (CNE). 

This literal form of voice mail became popular in the 1930s, with machines like Voice-O-Graph booths once common around the world. People paid a small fee to record their message, and within minutes, the machine popped out a vinyl record — and sometimes an envelope to mail it. Recipients played them on home gramophones, common in the first half of the 1900s.

In her recording, Cheryl tells her parents that she and her friends have been looking at automobiles at the CNE. She plans to attend the opera that evening, hopes to visit New York at Christmas — and promises to write them a letter soon. 

“I'm doing fine at work, and I'm quite happy here, and, uh, you've no need to worry,” she continued.

Princeton University associate professor Thomas Levin found the disc in an envelope addressed to Cheryl’s parents, Mr. And Mrs. Frost, in the U.K., at a record store in Toronto about 10 years ago. It’s not clear how it made its way back to Canada.

He first happened across a record like this at a flea market years ago and became fascinated. He’s since amassed about 5,000 of these messages in the Phono-Post archive, digitizing many of the physical records he finds and posting them online.

“Some were love letters. Some were ‘I really miss home,’ some were, ‘Look what a strange thing we just stumbled upon,’” said Levin, who teaches media and cultural theory.

Many people seemed intrigued with the chance to hear their own recorded voice, which was still a novelty a century ago, he says. Others “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 machines themselves were “remarkably widespread” and available to everyone, Levin says, with versions scattered across Canada and much of North and South America, as well as parts of Europe, and Japan.

“What's astonishing is that this was a major form of audio communication that is completely forgotten, overlooked, unknown,” Levin told The Current’s Matt Galloway.

Part of what made these recordings attractive was that they were relatively cheap, he says.

“It's very important to remember that telephone calls, which we also take for granted now … were very expensive,” he said, adding that prices increased for long-distance calls.

By contrast, these voice mails could “go transcontinental because for a few cents, 50 cents, 75 cents, you could send three minutes of your voice.”

Pricing changed over the years and varied country to country, Levin explained. 

The records themselves needed to be light enough to be sent cheaply through the mail, robust enough that they wouldn’t get damaged in transit, but also soft enough that the machine’s needle could engrave the recording as the person spoke. That meant the discs were made of a variety of materials, from aluminum to cardboard-vinyl hybrids. 

“By the 1930s and ‘40s, most people had a gramophone player in their living room and thus needed no special technology to play it,” Levin said.

Being able to replay the records was also a benefit.

“Many of the recordings in my archive that sound less pristine than others … may well have been due to the fact that they were played over and over again,” he said.

In a voice mail sent from the U.S. To Japan, an unnamed man professes his love for a woman called Keiko, promising to come to Japan soon to marry her.

“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 in my sleep,” the man said in the recording.

Levin suspects it was sent in the early 1950s. He says that kind of intimacy was common, but often complicated by the fact that gramophones were usually located in the living room.

“It had to be G-rated because the whole family would most likely be listening to this strange media object that had just arrived in the mail,” he said.

“Often what you find is hilarious forms of euphemism. ‘Oh, my dear, I miss you so much. Oh, you know what I'm thinking!’”

Levin says people never really stopped mailing voice messages — they just started using different technology — in particular when audio cassettes were invented in the 1960s.

Unlike the gramophone record, “these new platforms allowed for erasing, editing, re-recording. And so they're in a certain sense, an entirely different animal,” he said.

He says he’s always looking for new records to add to the Phono-Post archive, and sees the collection he’s created as “a ghost archive, an archive of the voices of the dead.”

He’ll often find people selling vinyl records of their grandparents on eBay, because they don’t have a record player to play them on. When he buys them, he offers to send back a digital audio file, so their loved ones can hear their voices again.

“Because the voice is so often linked to the living body, the breathing body … it makes these voices at once deeply powerful and deeply uncanny, deeply strange,” he said.

“It evokes a powerful sense of the person that is really quite extraordinary.”

Audio produced by Alison Masemann.

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