Wax: Material Resources of Phonographic Research

At the end of the 19th century, the phonograph became an important technology in the humanities for the reproducible, seemingly objective and exact analysis of speech, music and the acoustic environment. The Phonogramm-Archiv, founded in 1900 by Carl Stumpf at the Berlin Psychological Institute, and the Lautabteilung, founded in 1920 by Wilhelm Doegen at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, were particularly important in the German-speaking world. Both initiatives soon developed into large-scale interdisciplinary projects with several thousand wax cylinders and wax plates, enabling musicologists, linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists to carry out innovative research projects. The surviving recordings, now housed in the Ethnological Museum in the Humboldt Forum of the Berliner Stadtschloss, have attracted considerable scholarly attention and criticism in recent years, not least because parts of the collections date back to European colonial policies and imperialist research initiatives around the world. In addition to the provenance research aimed at a possible restitution and critical recontextualization of the archived voices, the subproject examines the political implications of the two large-scale projects on a material level, focusing on the geographical provenance, extraction processes, and supply chains of the waxes used for the photographic cylinders. In doing so, the project contributes to current provenance research, which is primarily concerned with the origins of artifacts in art and science collections that were forcibly acquired in wartime, colonial, and imperial contexts. The project demonstrates that such research can be extended, in part, to the different materials from which certain collection objects are made.