History of fieldwork recording technology
Recording technology
What is recording technology? In recording we transform (transduce) physical waves (sound and light) emanating from the field then preserve them in physical media for longer-term storage. The past becomes imprinted on the future. Ironically it may be the low tech (Sumerian clay tablets, LPs) which last longer (than floppy discs, or CDs...)
The scientific study of culture was completely transformed by the advent of recording technology, particular for "culture" that is evanescent, immaterial, intangible - such as performance in all its flavors, including ritual, speech, and music.
- Such technology centers on representing two sensory fields: hearing, and vision, as they are carried by waves (sound and light). Other senses are harder to capture.
- The “scientific” study of music was advanced by technology enabling recorded sound and image, turning the intangible and evanescent into the tangible and durable, stopping time, enabling careful study, and encouraging collection and comparison
- Technology turns music into an object - for better or for worse.
Early audio recording and ethnomusicology
- One of the key events was Thomas Edison’s development of the phonograph in 1877 (recorded and played back from cylinders) followed by Emile Berliner’s invention of the gramophone in 1887, leading to the Victor gramophone.
- But there were even earlier devices, e.g. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s record-only phonautograph invented in 1857 (http://www.firstsounds.org/).
- Introduction of these technologies triggered the advent of the sound archive (starting with the Berlin Phonogramm Archiv[1]), transformed the study of music and essentially gave rise to ethnomusicology (then "comparative musicology")
- Recordings were first made using wax cylinder recorders, portable and usable infield or outfield. One of the most famous images of such recording is this one: Frances Densmore recording Blackfoot songs from Mountain Chief at the Smithsonian
- Later shellac discs were used, and then vinyl.
- Besides their use for fieldwork, these technologies also enabled a new music industry, leading to the rise of popular music disseminated much more broadly than before, and generating new forms of ethnomusicology to study it!
Check out some of the retro technologies in this remarkable online museum!
Image and film recording
- Still image technology was developed in the 1820s and 1830s, first by Nicéphore Niépce, who developed the earliest photographic process, the heliograph, and Louis Daguerre who developed the daguerreotype
- Nascent motion picture technology emerged in France with the Lumiere brothers, whose first film was screened in 1895.
- Even earlier experiments included these shorts
Enlightenment, Science, Technology, and Colonialism
NB: All of this technology resulted from an era of European scientific advancement, itself built not only on the Enlightenment, but on technologies of travel and warfare, "discovery," conquest, missionizing, control, expropriation of resources, and the resources made available from such global imperialism and colonialism (especially free labor from the despicable slave trade), factors that ironically also gave rise to new directions in social science, including anthropology--initially serving colonialism--and ethnomusicology, which would later make extensive use of it.
Recording technology: directions
Over time recording technology has rapidly developed in three often converging directions:
- Audio recording. Sound recording technologies
- Still photography. History of photography
- Moving photography. History of film