Eva Kapeller-Hallama

‘THIS IS MY TAPE!!! YOU HEAR!’ LISTENING TO AUDIO LETTERS IN THE SONIME PROJECT

Spoken messages, voice and audio letters are hardly represented in archives and the collective memory, and have received little attention as sources of migration research, cultural and media history. But spoken letters have been recorded and listened to since the beginning of the 20th century, and the history of audio letters is closely linked to mobility, migration, and flight. My
contribution aims to highlight the listening experiences that audio letters have evoked since the turn of the 20th century. I will ask how voice letters were a means of staying in touch especially in times of geographical distance. How did the voice but also clearing the throat, breathing, coughing and the sounds of everyday life create and transmit sonic memories of the absent world across distance and time? A focus lies on aspects of listening and the Question of how listening and the imagination of being listened to are able to create this connection. Using selected audio letters from the SONIME research project and interviews I will analyse ideas and practices of listening to audio letters as part of communication practices via audio letters. I will also discuss and reflect on my own listening to audio letters of the SONIME collection. The aim of this collection is to preserve these private voices, recorded on analogue audio media, for future listeners.

Eva Kapeller-Hallama studied history in Vienna and St. Petersburg. She worked as a researcher and curator. For her doctoral thesis on Nazi border delousing camps in occupied Eastern Europe, she received a scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and was Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. Since 2021 she is principal investigator in the SONIME research project ‘Sonic Memories. Audio Letters in Times of Migration and Mobility’ at the Vienna Museum of Science and Technology and since May 2024 at the Department of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.