Sounding Ethnos: Phonography and Composition by Field in the Human Sciences

• In Event: Across the Senses: Human Sciences and their Material Conditions circa 1900

Abstract

The questions that guides the essay and the fields it enters are intimate both to anthropology’s historical concerns and to its self-composition as a scholarly field: what sensibility inspires a care for encounters with ethnos in various traditions of modernity? How is an ethos for ethnos composed, curated, and consumed in domains scientific, cultural, and artistic?

The piece opens with an analysis of Hermann von Helmholtz’ theories of harmony and his experimental set up for inquiry into the physics of acoustics. I take measure of his laboratory equipment—the siren and metronome in particular—and observe the absence of ethnos in his thinking on sound. This is followed by an examination of the explosive application of the phonograph as “a scientific instrument whose technical function had yet to be defined.” The essay proceeds with three case-based elaborations of the entry of phonographic practice and technique into three sound-related fields in the late 19th century and early 20th century: in Carl Stump and colleagues’ experimental psychology as it became comparative musicology in Germany, through Franz Boas, Walter Fewkes, and Alice Fletcher’s experiments with phonography in ethnological fieldwork amidst indigenous peoples in the Americas, and with Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók’s application of field-based phonography in pre-war Hungary for use as raw material in modernist art-music composition.

Spanning labs, fields, and archives, the essay brings a phonographically mediated orientation towards ethnos in modern music into sonic relief with the laboratory and field practices of German physical science and American ethnological science. In the end, I argue that the ethnographic care and commitment that came from the constitution of the phonograph as an instrument for listening and for sounding otherwise brings science studies and sound studies into accord with contemporary possibilities in the anthropology of science.

Author

• Gabriel Coren, UC Berkeley, Anthropology