Wax: Material Resources of Phonographic Research

At the end of the 19^th 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 Institute of Psychology in Berlin, and the Prussian State Library’s sound department (Lautabteilung), established in 1920 by Wilhelm Doegen, were particularly important in the German-speaking world. Both soon became large-scale interdisciplinary projects with several thousand wax cylinders and wax plates, enabling musicologists, linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists to carry out innovative research.

The surviving recordings, now housed in the Ethnological Museum at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, 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. Aiming for possible restitution and critical recontextualization of the archived voices, this subproject examines the political implications of the two large 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, it 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 and imperial contexts. The project demonstrates that such research can be extended, in part, to the different materials from which collection objects are made.