The phonograph: halfway between the ethnographic record and the announcement of radio

Abstract

During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century multiple devices capable of manipulating sound were created. These devices not only participated in the development of mass media but also helped to create some new disciplines. One significant creation was the phonograph, a device which had an important role in the emergence of Comparative Musicology as it allowed the recording and reproduction of music that was difficult to apprehend through listening and musical notation. In this paper, I intend to study the specificity of these ethnographic recordings by analyzing a set of them taken with Robert Lehmann-Nitsche’s phono­graph during 1905 in La Plata city. This set of recordings was named by himself as “Música Criolla” collection. In order to investigate the enun­ciative characteristics of these recordings, I use some concepts developed by José Luis Fernández (1994) to analyze the modes of radio enunciation. Profiting from these concepts I will be able to account for the novelty of some of these examples.