For muscicological research, sound archives are the bedrock, and they go back to the birth of recorded sound; their primary impulse was scientific. The first was founded in Vienna in 1899 at the prompting of the physiologist Sigmund Exner; a year later the psychologist Carl Stumpf founded the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv after recording a Siamese theatre group with the new-fangled Edison cylinders. Stumpf ’s pupil Erich von Hornbostel supervised the growth of this archive from 1905 until 1933, when he was sacked by the Nazis for being on his mother’s side Jewish. Although he made field recordings in Oklahoma, Tunisia, and the South Sea Islands, it was his analytical and comparative work on the materials in the archive which earned him fame as the founding father of what was called ‘comparative musicology’. ‘All learning is comparative,’ he wrote, and comparison would allow us to draw universal conclusions about ‘the origins and growth of music, and the nature of the musically beautiful’. It was typical of Hornbostel’s meticulousness that he should insist that his travelling researchers do every experiment twice.

Having started out as part of the Friedrich Wilhelm University’s psychology department, the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv relocated to the city’s conservatory, after which it became, under the Nazis, part of the Museum für Völkerkunde. That then morphed – after being dismembered during the Second World War – into the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. The Phonogramm-Archiv now hosts 350 separate collections, and holds 150,000 recordings, 16,000 of which are on wax cylinders, many complete with multiple-use metal negatives.

At around the time when the Vienna and Berlin archives were being founded, Franz Boas was persuading the American Museum to house the recordings he had made on his anthropological expedition to Siberia and Alaska. Thus were sound recordings enshrined as academically collectible, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology quickly followed suit. Today the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian – a university in all but name – are the dominant American players in the game, with the LOC holding 3.6 million sound recordings, of which the Alan Lomax Collection alone – one of the LOC’s many sub-collections – includes 6,400 sound recordings and 6,000 pieces of film.