About Four Impulses for Creating Phonographic Collections and Archives

The text reports on setting up phonograhic collections and archives in the past and discusses four attitudes of ethnologists and musicologists engaged in phonograph-aided field research. The enthusiasm for creating an alternative acoustical reality in time, the sound collection as a natural continuation of traditional libraries, the eager acceptance of recording technology to preserve and safeguard declining traditions, and the development of musical analyses thanks to multiple listenings to recordings – all these psychological components constituted the ideology of archives and initiated comparative musicology as a "science" and ethnomusicology concentrated on humanly organized sound.