viz.

The Edison-Bell picturegram from 1927 (in Sound Recordings). The toy illustrates the convergence of sound and image.

As the budding audio recording industry was creating use value by advertising the phonograph alongside writing machines, pens, pencils, and cameras, another convergence was happening as well. The motion picture industry, which developed concurrently with the audio recording industry, sought to synch up the sights and sounds of the body. Talking, singing, dancing, fighting, and falling had been standard in the motion picture industry since it began, but these bodily acts happened silently on screen. It was only a matter of time before the body would be audible on screen.

Illustration of Edison's original phonograph from Scientific American in 1877.

Between the visual origins of the phonograph and a robust consumer market centered on record labels, there was a period of time during which the invention had to establish its own utility. According to Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, utility always comes after the act of invention:

The link between uselessness and invention even applies to instrumental reason: a true invention is an object that precedes its utility. An invention is something for which a use must be created. Once the utility is produced, it rapidly self-converts into a need. This is the direction of flow of the history of technology (of which bodies, things, and objects are the first artifacts): backward. (96)