James Madison Carpenter (1888-1984) was a Harvard-trained scholar who recorded traditional singing in Britain and, to a lesser extent, in his native United States, in the period c.1928-40. His extensive collection includes 179 Dictaphone cylinders, totalling some 35 hours of examples (https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af010002). Although he worked on the collection throughout his life, Carpenter’s hopes for publication were never realized and he eventually sold it to the Library of Congress. It has since been digitized and is now available online via the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (https://www.vwml.org/archives-catalogue/JMC), facilitated though the work of an ongoing project by a team of UK- and US-based scholars towards surfacing the collection in a critical edition (https://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/carpenter/).
Carpenter was the first to consistently use a recording device in British folk song collecting. The cylinders thus have the potential to provide insights into traditional performance style and the comparative study of folk song melodies, as well as providing a relatively untapped source of repertoire for contemporary performers.
The quality of the sound recordings is, however, disappointingly poor, making Carpenter’s own transcriptions an essential complement. A self-trained musician, he found the process laborious, taking inspiration from the dictum that ‘a wrestler with sounds is a wrestler with shadows’.
This paper focuses on Carpenter’s approach to recording and evaluates his transcriptions, as well as outlining the issues involved in producing new ones. As we continue to wrestle with these historic sounds today, what is their potential for scholarship and performance, and what is the role of transcription in this context?
Music from Bosnia and Herzegovina was first recorded on cylinders during the Paris Exhibition in 1900. In 1907/1908 a series of recordings were made in Sarajevo and soon after commercially published as a part of the Zonophone series by Grammophone Company. Even though most of these recordings have been lost to history with the First World War, they provide us with an important glimpse into the state of Bosnian music scene in the beginning of the 20th Century. This paper offers an overview of the local perception of these recordings in local press, literature and subsequent repertoire of musicians in Sarajevo and wider region.
“A new ally has come to the cause in the form of an Edison Phonograph, whose function it is to preserve the Manx sounds as uttered by native speakers.” This is taken from the 1905 Annual Report of the Manx Language Society. The key figure here was Sophia Morrison, a Pan Celtic activist and leader of the Celtic Revival in the Isle of Man which started in the 1890s. The Island was also to see a visit in 1907 and 1909 by Rudolf Trebitsch on behalf of the Phonogrammarchive of Vienna and Berlin. The MLS were not the first to use the phonograph in the Island but the first to be systematic in its use. Whilst the phonograph survives and the cylinder recordings made are in large part lost, there is useful detail as to how the programme was organised and implemented which will be subject of the presentation.
Since the early 2000s, I have made phonographic recordings on cylinders of traditional musics at music festivals, artistic residencies and for public demonstrations of acoustic sound recording. Musicians from Spain, Senegal, Nigeria and South Korea, among other countries, have played and sung into my recording horn and their recordings reproduced to them mechanically on an ‘Edison’ phonograph. Their responses may arguably be compared to those experienced by the earliest phonographic recording subjects over one hundred years earlier – the awe of hearing a sound recording reproduced for the first time is replaced in this instance by feelings of curiosity, delight and amazement in the process of acoustic sound recording.
In the manner of early ethnographic practices, the recordings were all made ‘in the field’, often in difficult-to-record locations such as in the open air. Similarly, the recording apparatus used included a domestic Edison phonograph, such as those employed by ethnographers in the early 1900s, along with recorders and recording horns based on original examples. In this way, the entire recording set-up or dispositif, may be seen as a media-archaeological reenactment of past ethnographical recording practices. The results were likewise documented and archived as well as being disseminated through digital channels.
My presentation will focus on phonographic recordings on cylinders and documentation made at the annual Sinsal SON music festival on the island of San Simón in Galicia where since 2018, I have contributed to an ever-expanding archive of cylinder recordings that includes a variety of traditional musics from five continents.
In the summers of 1916 and 1917, the young folk music researcher Armas Otto Väisänen travelled through the remote villages of Border Karelia with a phonograph and a small hollow kantele from a museum. He aimed to collect the laments, kantele tunes and shepherd’s songs that were so scarce in the archives at the time. The old kantele tradition connected with the ancient runosong culture was disappearing, and by bringing an old instrument, Väisänen gave those who didn’t even have a kantele of their own the opportunity to play what they could remember. Supplemented by a short trip to Olonets Karelia in 1919 and later meetings with some individual tradition-bearers, Väisänen made detailed observations about the scales used by kantele players, the old playing technique and, above all, the special aesthetics of the music within the ancient tradition.
The copies of the wax cylinders are kept in the archives of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki. They present many challenges to modern listeners as it was not possible to get the instrument close enough to the phonograph horn, and thus it was not able to record all of the highest and lowest sounds. Also, the extremely poor quality of the surviving copies and their short examples, mostly of the dance tunes of the time, don’t open up the hours-long trance-like improvisation described by Väisänen and other scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But they do provide insights for musicians seeking new ways of performing this ancient music.
Between 1898 and 1938, over 1,600 wax cylinders were recorded in what is today Papua New Guinea. Recordists came from the colonial powers (Germany, Britain, Australia) and beyond, with the cylinders themselves being deposited in archives in those countries, but also in Austria, Finland, Hungary, and France, often according to the nationality of the recordist. Recordists were ethnographers, missionaries, linguists, government officers, and other adventurers, many with an association with Erich von Hornbostel at the Berlin Phonogramm Archive.
Since the establishment of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in 1974, staff have been trying to obtain copies of these cylinders for its Audiovisual Archive: it is strongly felt that such materials should be available in the country in which they have most meaning. And, where possible, attempts have been made to reconnect communities today with such early recordings made in their regions.
Locating and obtaining copies of cylinders has been greatly successful, so that copies of almost all these cylinder recordings are held in the IPNGS Audiovisual Archive. According to the project concerned and available funding, the reconnection work continues in a variety of ways, such as through published recordings or research focused on particular collections.
This presentation will consider this considerable history of wax-cylinder recording activity in Papua New Guinea, the various uses that have been made of such recordings internationally, reactions to hearing the cylinders locally, and possible future directions.
Biological membranes are essential components of all living organisms, forming cell boundaries and facilitating crucial processes like membrane fusion.[1] However, our understanding of fusion is limited due to the lack of effective control tools. DNA nanotechnology has emerged as a promising solution, offering precise control over membrane morphology and interaction dynamics. Through the fabrication of DNA nanotools, we aim to control membrane fusion and investigate the interaction between DNA-lipid hybrid nanostructures. A mechanical DNA nanostructure that transitions from an open to a closed state,[2] facilitating fusion initiation of attached membrane vesicles is exploited. Using ensemble methods and direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM), we observed that vesicles exhibit wobbling around the defined anchoring site of DNA nanostructures. To further understand these interactions in 3D, we introduced a T-shaped DNA nanoprobe (DNP), exploring parameters like the number and position of cholesterol anchors. Ensemble methods and dSTORM revealed that DNP with a single lipid anchor can discriminate between differently sized vesicles, potentially aiding in the identification of diagnostically relevant exosomes.[3] This research advances DNA nanotechnology, paving the way for improved tools for membrane fusion control and the design of nanodevices for vesicle-based research, biosensing, and diagnostics.
References
[1] L. V. Chernomordik et al. 2008. Mechanics of membrane fusion. Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol.15, 675-683.
[2] F. N. Gür et al. 2021. Double- to single-strand transition induces forces and motion in DNA origami nanostructures. Adv. Mater. 33:2101986.
[3] H. Zhang et al. 2018. Identification of distinct nanoparticles and subsets of extracellular vesicles by asymmetric flow field-flow fractionation. Nat. Cell Biol. 20, 332-343.
A large body of research demonstrates that human faces attract attention. This is also true in video, with eye-tracking studies showing that fixations are clustered on the people in the scene. I will review a number of studies from psychology investigating where observers look when watching people in video, and how this is related to their understanding and judgements of the scene.
For example, participants are quite consistent in their judgements of people having a conversation, even from a brief video clip (“thin-slicing”). We have shown that when watching such clips the individuals who receive the most attention are those who are rated as the most dominant or prestigious in the group. This is one case where participants must make a decision about who to fixate at each point in time, and this appears to vary due to both the behaviour of the actor and the characteristics of the observer. In crowd scenes featuring multiple people, certain targets get fixated more often than others and this is affected by age and attractiveness.
When observing pre-recorded conversation, participants spend most of the time fixating the person speaking, but they can also anticipate the change in speaker. This may be partly due to reading the cues provided by interacting participants (such as their gaze). We can manipulate these cues to study signalling in a naturalistic setting, and we have also shown nuanced differences in observers high in autistic and ADHD-related traits. Importantly, we also find a close correspondence between fixations on pre-recorded videos and the gaze displayed by participants in a real face-to-face interaction, which suggests a high level of ecological validity.
Taken together, these studies show “social attention” operating in complex and dynamic situations. This involves not just looking at other people, but selecting specific individuals, and specific behavioural cues, in order to interpret the scene.
Among the phonograph cylinders held at the Budapest Museum of Ethnography are over 3,000 with Bartók’s field recordings made before the outbreak of WW1 in the Romanian-speaking territories of what was then Hungary. The Bucharest Institute of Ethnography and Folklore has more than 10,000 further cylinders with field and studio recordings made in the 1930s in Romania by Constantin Brăiloiu and his collaborators. For Bartók the cylinders were, at the time, a means to an end: the detailed notation and classification of folk music in pursuance of his growing interest in ‘comparative musical folklore’. For Brăiloiu the chief interest lay in his conviction that oral traditions are underpinned by system no less than those of notated classical music. Today the two collections present us with an incomparably rich repository for further research, not least in understanding the psychology of how lyrical verses are stored in and retrieved from memory in notationless cultures. This is a topic that has resonance in medieval songs whose notation is similarly is a matter of record rather than prescription. The most teasing aspect of such songs has long been considered to lie in their rhythms. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, since it was not until the mid-thirteenth century that the utterly novel idea was rehearsed that certain kinds of music are precisely measurable. Surprising as it may seem, the cylinder recordings, taken in conjunction with Bartók’s writings on ‘parlando-rubato’ rhythm and Brăiloiu’s on ‘syllabic giusto’, have much to tell us about singing ‘beyond measure’ in medieval times.
Eduard Jedlička immigrated to the New York from Bohemia under the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1895. In addition to having a career as a jeweler, Jedlička recorded all manner of Czech songs and poetry on his own label, Jedličkovy České Rekordy. Jedlička’s cylinders are some of the first recordings made for a specific ethnic group in the United States. This presentation will trace the history of Jedlička’s life, his business, and the recent discovery of original Ed. Jedlička cylinders. The National Museum, Czech Republic has worked to identify, describe, transcribe, and translate these cylinders in collaboration with the University of Iowa’s Rita Benton Music Library. These unusual specimens of early recording document Czech culture in the United States, which this paper will explore through the songs, performers, and producers of the content.