Benedict Anderson famously suggested that the emergence of nationalism should be anchored in the context of new timekeeping protocols that make possible new forms of conviviality, holding together previously dispersed collectives. Yet Anderson's focus on simultaneity and horizontal synchronicity fails to account for the emotional intensity of nationalism. It does not probe its erotic dimensions, or the instances in which love for the nation is more akin to attraction to a sexual partner than to affinity with strangers moving together through empty and homogeneous time. This paper explores how titillating delays and instances of failed synchronicity structured Egyptian nationalism. It examines newly introduced media such as the radio and telephone which reconfigured, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the meanings and emotions attached to the feminine voice and its transmission. It suggests that recording and broadcasting technologies like radios and gramophones forced voices into fixed temporal frames which prevented improvisation and the coaxing expansion or repetition of a musical theme as a means of delaying (and thus amplifying) its climax. At the same time, other technologies, such as the manually operated telephone switchboard, allowed women (as wives and unmarried switchboard operators) to put man on hold in various new ways. Thus orchestrating the public sphere of men, these disembodied female voices played an important, yet invisible role in the history of nationalism. Indeed, invisibility has been enabling in a setting where feminine visibility and respectability were hardly commensurable. In contrast to recent historiographical trends for which metaphorical "voices" are indexical to agency, this paper seeks to retrieve these voices, also in the literal sense of the word.