It’s a little known fact that people have been podcasting already a hundred years ago. They weren’t subscribed to RSS or Atom feeds then but to théâtrophone networks, and they used their telephones instead of mobile MP3 players to listen to the shows, yet there was a flourishing phonecasting scene in many major cities around the world.

Zoe Irvine’s Dial-a-Diva – an event spanning the globe for 24 hours, connecting singers and listeners live by telephone – is a lovely project remembering these pioneers but also reflecting current telephonic soundscapes:

In today’s culture of telephony besides having a chat on the phone, distant outsourced call centres bring customer services to clients as if they were down the road, the latest hits are translated to polyphonic ring tones, we spend hours speaking to synthesised voices to get train times, we listen to music on hold whether we like it or not and we broadcast in intimate detail our lives down the phone and the train for all to hear and occasionally at a concerts, lifting the handset towards the band we let one not present participate in the event, for a highly compressed moment at least.