Audio ethnography: Sound in the age of reproducibility

Question 1

Give a brief history of audio in ethnomusicology

Answer 1

Recording music, recording interviews and life stories, recomposing audio, using audio to elicit further discussion.
1890- Jesse Walter Fewkes begins using phonographs in fieldwork with native American tribes
Ca. 1900 - Berlin, Vienna phonograph archives
Early 1900’s - Important female recordists like Alice Cunningham, Frances Densmore (Salvage Ethnography)
1930s - Shift to disc recording, Lomax and other song catchers like Laura Boulton
1948 -Moses Asch founds Folkway Records with Marian Distler; early musique concrete experiments at GRM Paris
Ca. 1950 - Widespread use of tape recordings
1970s - Emergence of non-fiction ‘phonography’/soundscape composition

Question 2

What does world music mean?

Answer 2

Marketing category from 1980s record labels