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When people in the early twentieth century first heard their own voices played back or saw themselves captured on film, it must have felt like magic. For the first time in history, sound and sight could be detached from the human body and replayed at will. Music no longer needed a performer; memory no longer relied on recollection. These new technologies—the phonograph, the camera, and eventually the cinema—did more than record experience; they changed what experience was. They created a culture of mechanical reproduction that reshaped how people felt, remembered, and imagined the world. The Invention of Mechanical Memory Edison…