«New media are media we do not yet know how to talk about», claims media historian Benjamin Peters: in fact, the introduction of new media into society has always triggered the production of written documents, which deal in different ways with the ontological and epistemological nature of the new medium. Recorded sound in Italy made no exception: between the 1920s and 1930s several articles about recorded sound began to appear on printed media. Indeed, the Italian phonographic discourse stemmed considerably later, if compared with other European countries, due to the economic, cultural and social configuration of the Peninsula. Nonetheless, two rather animated debates appeared at the same time in two completely different cultural contexts: on one hand, musicians and philosophers connected with the idealistic school of thought by Benedetto Croce started questioning the nature of recordings connected to musical interpretation, also referring to the ideas of European composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. On the other hand, a parallel debate, raised in juridical and industrial contexts, aimed at protecting recording industry by applying the new-born copyright laws to it. Starting from opposite premises, these two environments reached the same fundamental questions: what is recorded music? Is it an original production or just a mere re-production? What is the role of performers?, which inevitably defined the ontological substance of recorded music.