History of fieldwork technology
- Field notes result from a kind of “mental recording”, which is transferred to words and symbols on paper as quickly as is practical.
- The “scientific” study of music was advanced by the technology enabling recorded sound.
- Similarly mechanical recordings of sound and image advanced the study of culture generally in related fields.
- One of the founding events of ethnomusicology was 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, with an antecedent in Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s record-only phonautograph invented in 1857 (http://www.firstsounds.org/).
- Along with still image technology (developed by Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre in the 1820s and 1830s) and nascent motion picture technology (Lumiere brothers, whose first screening was in 1895), physical waves emanating from the field could now be captured (or rather “projected”) onto physical media for long-term storage. The past became imprinted on the future.
Over time recording technology has rapidly developed in three often converging directions:
- Audio recording
- Still photography
- Moving photography
