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UnArchive: Sonic Materialities and Sound Media of Migration

By Nazan Maksudyan

This research is part of a wider research programme aiming to provide a sounded history of migration in Europe from the 1960s to the late 1980s. The cultural history of labor migration is a well-established field with a rich body of scholarship. However, the production of everyday life by labor migrants through sonic means, and the sound cultures shaped by experiences of displacement, have received comparatively little attention. In this short intervention, I emphasize the audibility of migration and propose that it is possible both to listen to and listen with migration (Friedrichs & Severin-Barboutie 2021) by drawing on three theoretical axes.

First, following Tom Western, I argue that sound is a central dimension in understanding and representing migration, making it necessary to integrate sound studies into migration history. Second, a focus on sonic materialities and “sonic things” (Tkaczyk & van der Miesen 2020) brings into view neglected dimensions of the social, cultural, and media histories of migration. These largely overlooked sound and media objects—portable radios, tape recorders, compact cassettes—remain understudied in part because they are preserved primarily within private or family archives and correspondence. Third, I highlight affective practices of listening, as the embodied qualities of orality and voice are crucial to the formation of affective communities (Street 2014; McHugh 2012).

I underscore the value of a media-archaeological approach (Ernst 2007) and a media-historical perspective not as technological determinism but because they illuminate sonic cultural practices of migration that might otherwise remain illegible. Attending to the use of sound objects and the meanings they assumed in the lives of labor migrants opens a productive connection between sonic material culture and the emotional history of migration (Frevert 2021; Hartwig et al. 2019; Barua et. al. 2023). The discussion below draws on preliminary research on migrant workers in the Federal Republic of Germany and relies on written, visual, and oral sources documenting their use of sound and media objects.

Portable Radios

Six men listening to the portable radios in their hands, looking happy.
Fig. 1: Italian labor migrants with their portable radios in Wolfsburg, 1962. Photo by Benno Wundshammer via bpk-Fotoarchiv, No. 70247820.

There is a growing scholarly interest in the role of audiovisual media in processes of migration (MacLennan & Biswas 2023; Sieber & de Toro 2021). Research on the early history of radio broadcasting in migrants’ native languages in the FRG highlights its entanglement with Cold War politics. In 1961, West German radio stations began airing programs for the country’s 120,000 Italian migrants. Weekly broadcasts in Spanish and Greek followed in February 1962, and in 1964 the WDR launched its Turkish-language program Köln Radyosu (Kosnick 2000). The emergence of these Gastarbeitersendungen was tied directly to demands from the Italian, Spanish, and Turkish governments that the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten (ARD) protect their citizens in the FRG from “communist propaganda” transmitted from Budapest, Prague, and East Berlin (Kosnick 2007; Sala 2011).

A small dorm filled with clothes and bunk beds, a radio in the middle.
Fig. 2: Workers’ Heim in Karlsruhe, 1971. A radio at the centre of the image, its antenna directed upwards. Photo by Horst Schlesiger via Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe, Bildarchiv Schlesiger 1971 8/BA Schlesiger 1971/A22_48_2_16.

One day, somehow we managed to get the Turkish radio station TRT. We were afraid that we could not find it again so we stuck the button of the radio to its spot with glue. Then it played some songs and we cried.

While the broadcasting side of this history is relatively well studied, the quote above illustrates the relevance of examining also these deeply charged practices of listening. Such moments reveal the intensity of sonic intimacies formed around the radio. The possibility of hearing one’s native language—through speech, song, or familiar sonic cues—partially eclipsed the physical and emotional distance from home. Radio thus became a medium through which migrants attempted to reassemble a fractured sense of proximity, creating fleeting but affectively powerful bridges between their present displacement and their homes.

The act of gluing the tuning button in place is especially evocative. It signals both the fragility and the preciousness of this auditory connection. While the workers themselves were displaced and in constant motion, the radiophonic voice traveled across vast distances to reach them; fixing the radio into immobility was a material attempt to secure that connection, to prevent its accidental loss. In this small gesture, the radio becomes not merely a device but an anchor—a stabilized sonic object that counteracts the instability of migrant life. Through such practices, portable radios were transformed into sites of emotional investment, technologies through which migrants enacted forms of belonging otherwise unavailable to them.

As a result, workers’ dormitories and pensions in the early 1960s were soon filled with portable radios, which rapidly became mass consumer items. Visual documentation of labor migration repeatedly shows the prevalence of radios in these living spaces, a presence that persisted for decades (see Fig. 2). This demand translated into remarkable audience ratings, and the programs’ sociopolitical function grew accordingly. They provided practical information on work-related concerns—wages, taxes, appointments, trade unions—as well as guidance for everyday life (Sala 2005).

An advertisement for a portable radio.
Fig. 3: Panasonic RF-7270 advertisement (1969). Source: Esquire, April 1969.

Some programs were run by intellectuals with migration backgrounds—students, refugees, and migrants who had come to the FRG and became prominent mediators for their communities (Gezen 2018; Adamopoulou 2025). The radiophonic voice thus became a powerful tool of representation, both for those behind the microphone and for those listening. Seen as responsive Ansprechpartner, the editorial offices of these radio programs received thousands of letters in which migrants posed concrete questions about their daily problems. These letters were often read aloud on air, creating yet another layer of sonic interaction.

Radio-corders

The introduction of radio-cassette recorders toward the end of the 1960s significantly reshaped the sound ecologies of migrant communities. Advertisements for devices such as the Panasonic emphasized portability—“can travel wherever you do”—and the capacity to “tape up to two hours of your favorite sounds.” These machines combined a compact cassette recorder with a portable radio in a single unit, complete with built-in amplifier and speaker. Crucially, they enabled users not only to play pre-recorded music but also to record directly from radio broadcasts, turning fleeting transmissions into repeatable, durable sound objects.

Radio-corders transformed listening habits in labor migrants’ everyday lives. Recording from the radio became a widespread practice, particularly valuable in contexts where leisure time and access to broadcasts were limited. The ability to capture programs, songs, or news for later playback introduced new rhythms of listening centered on repetition, anticipation, and domestic routine. Affordable prices and ease of use further contributed to the device’s popularity among migrant families.

My father taught me how to record radio programs on tape. Every day when he was at work, I would record Turkish news, songs and folk songs (şarkı ve türkü). My father would come home from work at 1 a.m. He would listen to the tape quietly in the living room and then go to bed.

An old radio recorder in brown and silver.
Fig. 4: Radio recorder Nordmende IDOL+recorder 115A (1973).
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

This recollection underscores how radio-corders recalibrated the temporality of sonic experience. Given the ephemerality of radio transmission, recording constituted an attempt to resist the singularity of the broadcast moment by creating the possibility of return—listening again, listening later, listening together or alone. Sound that once vanished into the air could now be replayed, stabilized, and woven into daily life. Through the diffusion of such recording technologies, migrant listeners found ways to bend spatial and temporal boundaries, crafting acoustic continuities that mitigated the distance separating them from their homes and families.

Voice Letters

The histories of twentieth-century migration and sound recording technologies have generated rich scholarship on migrating voices and the circulation of recorded speech. Recent and ongoing projects explore diverse forms of “voice letters” captured on wax cylinders, acetate discs, vinyl records, magnetic tapes, and compact cassettes. Panayotis Panopoulos’s work on “vocal letters” recorded on acetate discs and exchanged between Australia and Greece foregrounds how recorded voices mediate presence and absence and create shared memory within dispersed collectivities (Panopoulos 2018). Earlier technologies such as the “Voice-o-graph” booth—audio counterparts to photo booths—offered individuals the possibility to record brief messages for mailing (Levin 2010). These booths, popular in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, also appeared elsewhere, including Istanbul. A rare surviving example from a Taksim entertainment hall, “Uncle Sam” (Sam Amca), points to their local adoption in Turkey during the same period (Fig. 5).[1]

A record envelope out of brown paper.
Fig. 5: Envelope for a Voice Letter (Sesli Mektup) from a record booth in Istanbul, Uncle Sam Entertainment Hall (Sam Amca Eğlence Salonu) in Balo Street, Taksim. Photo via https://www.bitmezat.com/urun/6874672/enteresan-bir-sesli-mektup-ornegi-ici-dinlenmedi-orijinal-zarfinda.

With the rise of magnetic tape, manufacturers such as Philips promoted the idea of the “family sound album,” encouraging users to create “talking family albums” that captured the intimate moments of everyday life (Bijsterveld 2004). Yet it was the compact cassette that truly democratized the practice. Lightweight, durable, and inexpensive, the cassette became an ideal medium for long-distance communication. Battery-powered cassette recorders, widely available by the 1970s, allowed migrants not only to speak to their families but also to equip their families with the means to speak back. Cassette players were commonly brought home as gifts; instructions in recording and playback became part of the migration script. While postal services were sometimes used, tapes were often sent through intermediaries – fellow migrants traveling “home” who carried both recorded messages and their replies.[2]

Gülten Dayıoğlu’s 1975 book Geride Kalanlar (Those Left Behind), which focuses on migrant workers in particular, contains examples of how migrants used cassette and tape technology in their daily lives. Derviş, who got married during his leave before immediately returning to Germany to work, used voice letters to cope with his longing for his young wife, Turna.[3]

As advertisements for devices like the Panasonic above reminded consumers, this new technology enabled one to record “anything. Anywhere.” Its erasability was equally crucial: one could overwrite a tape endlessly. Yet this material affordance sometimes clashed with emotional imperatives. Thomas and Znaniecki attributed a “sentimental function” to letter-writing and the same holds for sonic correspondence (Stanley 2010). For many migrants, overwriting a voice was unthinkable; erasure threatened to undo the fragile presence that the recording provided. One testimony captures this tension between preferring to keep the sound object intact, despite its innate plasticity:

My husband recorded his voice and sent it home from Germany. He told me to speak on the same tape and send it back. I couldn’t speak over his voice. I wrote him a letter, as I always did.

Listening practices also became communal events. Families, neighbors, and sometimes entire villages gathered to hear the recorded voice of a distant loved one. Intimacy, however, was managed through the material structure of the cassette. Private messages were often placed on the reverse side, marked by explicit warnings:

My father sent an audio letter… at the end of A side, he warns [my mother]: ‘Listen to the back of the tape when you are alone.’ At night I hear my mother crying softly. My father is singing a song to my mother on the back of the tape: ‘You know who’s crying far away, I can’t come, my love, fate won’t let me.’

Such examples reveal how voice letters combined informational, sentimental, and artistic functions. Spoken messages mingled with songs, poems, jokes, and oral performances, producing multilayered sonic artifacts that sustained affective ties across great distances. Voice letters thus emerge not merely as communication tools but as emotionally charged media objects that helped migrants negotiate absence, craft presence, and articulate the textures of long-distance intimacy.

An album cover in pink, featuring a mountain landscape.
Fig. 6: Songs of Gastarbeiter Vol. 1. Source: https://www.songs-of-gastarbeiter.com/vol-i.

Mixtapes

Amateur cassette recording—combining musical tracks with spoken commentary, jokes, dedications, and other oral traces—formed a vibrant mixtape culture that sonified the everyday life of migrant communities. Closely related to the radio-recording practices discussed earlier and emerging as an informal counterpart to voice letters, mixtapes allowed migrants to curate personal sound-worlds that blended memory, emotion, and mobility. They functioned as portable archives of taste, experience, and longing.

The “Songs of Gastarbeiter” compilation curated by AYKU (İmran Ayata and Bülent Kullukçu) stands in continuity with this tradition. Bringing together tracks by artists across several generations of so-called guest workers, the compilation documents how music narrated life in Germany—working conditions, social tensions, interpersonal relations, and the emotional textures of migration. Many of these songs had long disappeared from circulation and had to be recovered from private archives, further underscoring the fragility and importance of migrant sound cultures.

Book cover with a drawing of a man besides his car.
Fig. 7: Cover of Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Fikrimin İnce Gülü (1976). Photo via Wikipedia Commons.

On the other hand, my focus goes beyond migrant musical practices (Greve, 2003; Aksoy, 2020; Stokes, 2011) to highlight the cultural and political functions of mixtapes for migrant communities as a distinct media form with a specific media logic. Mixtapes were particularly invaluable for the long “Sıla Yolu” (Heimatweg) journeys between Western Europe and Turkey. These long road trips created a unique listening environment, with curated sequences of music accompanying the emotional and temporal journey from ‘here’ to ‘home’.

Adalet Ağaoğlu’s 1976 novel Fikrimin İnce Gülü captures this soundscape through its protagonist, a labor migrant who records his favourite songs — most notably the titular “Fikrimin İnce Gülü” — at the start of his road trip tape.

It was rushed, I could only choose three songs [for my mixtape]. Anyway, I had my favourite song recorded right at the beginning, and that’s what matters. If only this one plays, that is enough for me.[4]

This testimony reflects the affective logic of mixtapes: the careful placement of a single meaningful song could anchor an entire journey. Mixtapes thus operated as self-fashioned emotional companions, shaping the sonic rhythms of travel and sustaining migrants through the liminal spaces between departure and return.

Hearing Migrants: Oral history and interviews

Yusuf.. talk about yourself, tell your troubles. Someone has come to listen to you. It’s not like the radio – you don’t listen to it, she listens to you [laughter].[5]

A man and a woman sitting in front of a microphone.
Fig. 8: Füruzan interviewing a worker in a Heim with her small compact tape recorder and microphone. Source: Back cover of Yeni Konuklar [New Guests], Cover Design by Fahri Karagözoğlu, (Istanbul: bilgi yayınevi, 1977).

A final sonic practice central to the representation of migrant subjectivities emerged from the growing interest of non-migrant researchers in recording migrants’ voices. The increasing availability and technical simplicity of portable tape recorders made them a standard research tool in the late 1960s and 1970s. Oral historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and sociologists incorporated sound recording into their fieldwork, and in doing so captured the sonic expressions, narrative styles, and vocal affect of labor migrants.

A particularly significant example is Füruzan’s fieldwork in West Germany in 1975–76. During her visits to Ruhr mining communities and to migrant households in West Berlin, she recorded extended interviews and everyday conversations.[6] These were later published in Turkish (Yeni Konuklar, 1977) and German (Logis im Land der Reichen, 1985). The volumes present long, minimally edited transcripts that reveal how sound media structured migrants’ lives —providing companionship, cultural continuity, and shared auditory routines. Radio listening, in particular, emerges as a central theme:

In terms of education and people learning things, Germany is priceless… All the workers in the Heims listen to the radio. They all become an ear and listen together (birlikte kulak olup dinliyorlar).[7]

Such testimonies also illuminate the transnational movement of sound devices themselves —from Germany to Turkey and back—and the bureaucratic frictions that accompanied this circulation:

Mustafa – … at the [Turkish] customs … of course you’re taking from here a tape recorder with you… The state has given you the right, they say you have to pay 600, 650 lira for a tape recorder at customs. I pay the 600, plus a little more to the customs officer, because… [noises, laughter increases]… that’s how you get through customs smoothly.[8]

These interviews demonstrate how recorded voice not only documents migrant experience but also becomes part of it: a medium through which migrants articulate their social worlds and through which researchers, in turn, “listen back” to the sonic dimensions of migration history.

UnArchive

“Found sound” in amateur migrant recordings—captured in taped radio programs, voice letters, and mixtapes—offers less an archive in the conventional sense than what might be called an unarchive: a dispersed, fragile, and often accidental constellation of sonic traces that resists neat cataloguing. Rather than focusing on the content of these recordings, approaching them through a media-ecological and media-archaeological lens reveals how sonic materialities andsound technologies structured migrants’ everyday lives, shaped experiences of distance and belonging, and generated new forms of relationality.

The UnArchive thus foregrounds not what is said, sung, or recorded, but the material practices, listening habits, and affective attachments that made these sounds meaningful. Attending to these sonic infrastructures allows us to hear migration history differently—not through official narratives or institutional records, but through the resonances of ordinary devices and the intimate worlds they helped migrants sustain.


This research is supported by the UKRI-funded ERC Starting Grant, “Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789-1922 (EP/X032833/1)”, a cooperation of the University of Cambridge and Centre Marc Bloch.


Notes

[1] Eva Hallama’s project, SONIME (ÖAW), Sonic Memories: Audio Letters in Times of Migration and Mobility also collects and researches audio letters that have been sent by post to Austria.

[2] Wajid Yaseen’s project, “Tape Letters: Migration on Tape” documents sending messages on cassette tape by Pakistanis who migrated and settled in the UK between 1960-1980. Nicola Scaldaferri’s research on an Albanian-speaking community of south Italy with a history of migration to the United States also documents a  similar use of the tape recorder for voice letters. Scaldaferri, N. (2014). “Voice, body, technologies: tales from an Arbëresh village” TRANS Transcultural Music Review 18: 1–21.

[3] Gülten Dayıoğlu, Geride Kalanlar (Istanbul: bilgi yayınevi, 1975).

[4] Adalet Ağaoğlu, Fikrimin İnce Gülü, (İstanbul: Remzi, 1976), 24.

[5] “Yusuf – Tanıt halini de, anlat dertlerini bakalım. Gelip bir dinleyen var işte. Radyo değil, sen dinlemiyeceksin, o seni dinleıyecek. Gülüşmeler.” Füruzan, Yeni Konuklar (İstanbul: bilgi yayınevi, 1977), 313.

[6] For further information on Füruzan’s artistic production in Germany, see Burcu Alkan, Nazan Maksudyan (2023), “Children at the Margins of Labour Migration in Füruzan’s Works after Germany,” tuded: Journal of Turkish Language and Literature 63(2), 115–139.

[7] Füruzan, Yeni Konuklar (İstanbul: bilgi yayınevi, 1977), 189.

[8] Füruzan, Yeni Konuklar (İstanbul: bilgi yayınevi, 1977), 314.


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About the Author

Nazan Maksudyan is a visiting professor at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin and a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in the UKRI-funded research project, “Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1914”. She was a »Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe« (EUME) Fellow in 2009–2010 and an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) in 2010–2011 and in 2016 and 2018. From 2013 to 2016, she worked as a professor of history in Istanbul and received her habilitation degree in 2015. Her research mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, with special interest in children and youth, gender, sexuality, exile, sound, and the history of sciences. Among her publications are Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (2019), Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (2014), Women and the City, Women in the City (ed., 2014), Urban Neighborhood Formations (ed. with Hilal Alkan, 2020).


Citation: Nazan Maksudyan, UnArchive: Sonic Materialities and Sound Media of Migration, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 25.01.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/63918


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (January 27, 2026). UnArchive: Sonic Materialities and Sound Media of Migration. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved February 7, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15kmv


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