The Sound of Evolution

This essay tracks the emergence of comparative musicology in Germany circa 1900, concentrating on the use of the phonograph by Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, founders of the Berlin Phonogram Archive. The phonograph served as a scientific instrument for charting the evolution of music, based on recordings of "exotic melodies" performed at ethnographic exhibitions and other urban venues. Situating the discipline in the context of historical debates about evolution, colonialism, modernity, and mass culture, this essay argues that comparative musicology took shape and assumed resonance as a mode of phonographic discourse that aimed to make evolution audible.