specimen, the type specimen.11 The type specimen or holotype was a single plant or animal body chosen to serve as the definitive reference for the identification of an entire species. Whenever possible, the type specimen would be the first known example of the new species, and the honor of naming it fell to its discoverer. The species’ name was literally (with a label) and metaphorically (with nomenclature) attached to this individual body. Although some biologists believed that no single specimen should serve to resolve debates or questions about species identity, those who favored type specimens over texts dominated the debate in the United States and Europe by the early 1900s. With the adoption of the American Code of Botanical Nomenclature in 1907, the specimen became the central object of research in natural history, and the comparison of specimens was the single most important element in determinations of species identity. After 1907, the code was adapted for research in paleontology, zoology, and entomology, and other fields in the natural sciences. As one American entomologist wrote in the 1920s, the type specimen had become “the court of last resort in settling questions of identity.”12
Type specimens brought together the visual display of the body, the twofold play of sameness and difference, and the systematic classification of typology. With the rise of the specimen came a shift in the way identity was understood, away from conceptual categories and toward specific, individual plant and animal bodies. Typology was no longer the ordering of ideas, but the ordering of specimens, with the type specimen serving as an exemplary case of the practice. “The specimen is, after all, the main thing,” wrote one high school biology teacher in New York in 1907, the same year the Code of Botanical Nomenclature was adopted.13
With the adoption of the type specimen, the centrality of viewing pointed out thirty years ago by Donna Haraway and Mieke Bal became a critical element in the traditions that shaped not only biological specimens, but their sonic counterparts.14 The visual tradition of specimen collecting contrasted with the challenges of quantifying and measuring sonic information, engaging attempts to apply this “court of identity” to sound in the differences between sound’s mutability and the apparently stable nature of visual information. In reality, the specimen itself resolved a similar problem in biological science by substituting a preserved corpse for a living animal, exchanging information about behavior and its context for fixed information about morphology and anatomy. In the context of sound, the analogous solution was the inscription and transcription of sound in wax cylinders and on paper, making “living” sound a fixed object that could be measured. This solution, however, engaged scholars in two related practices that had considerable impact on the way sonic data was formulated: first, methods of recording and listening to sound were developed in response to criteria for data derived from the biological specimen tradition; and second, this tradition engaged scholars in a conflicted rhetorical opposition of life and death, sound and silence.
SOUND IN THE MUSEUM
Moving from the National Museum of Natural History’s botany collections to the shelves of artifacts in the Department of Anthropology, one finds a new set of bodies whose forms reveal identity and identification. Among the bowls and arrowheads are the ghosts of the wax cylinder recordings that once resided here, moved in the 1970s from natural history to the American Folklife Center, a division of the Library of Congress. The move was a retrograde of our imaginary deposit of Pinus glauca pulpus, in which sound left the museum for a library, instead of leaving a library for the museum. If we shift the clock into backward motion, the recordings tell one part of a much larger story about the institutional life of the sonic specimen.
The oldest of the museum’s recordings was its collection of Hopi songs and speech on old Edison wax cylinders, collected in the 1890s during the Hemenway Southwestern Archeological Expedition. The cylinders had been inscribed on this hot and dusty expedition before being sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, DC, in 1894. The bureau was devoted to pure anthropological research, with a sister institution focused on applied research in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History.15 Though the cylinders probably served researchers in both divisions, in 1965 they were officially moved to the museum, as the bureau was incorporated into the department. There the bowls, arrowheads, and bracelets collected on the Hemenway Expedition still reside. But the cylinders are for the most part gone, except for a few copies: they moved again in the early 1970s, leaving the realm of natural history entirely for the Library of Congress, where they now reside in the American Folklife Center. Their life as specimens is (or, at least, is meant to be) over, for they serve a new tenure as part of the center’s commitment to “creative expressions.”16
In 1890, however, the cylinders were envisioned quite differently. Their collector, Jesse Walter Fewkes, wrote that year, “What specimens are to the naturalist in describing genera and species, or what sections are to the histologist in the study of cellular structure, the cylinders are to the student of language.”17 Fewkes was among the first to use the phonograph in ethnographic research, making the Hemenway cylinders a landmark in ethnology. Both complete specimens and the histological specimens prepared for microscope slides, called “sections,” were familiar to him from his work as a zoologist curating the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. There he had worked as Alexander Agassiz’s assistant in the 1880s, overlapping slightly with Charles Otis Whitman and leaving just before Charles Davenport’s arrival.18 After a falling-out with Agassiz, Fewkes turned to ethnology and worked his way to the top of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology.19
Fewkes chose a fortuitous moment to champion the phonograph as the future of ethnography. He was a decade ahead of the collection of phonograph recordings begun by Carl Stumpf in Berlin in 1900, which became Europe’s preeminent ethnographic sound collection under the aegis of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (the subject of chapter 4). Over the next forty years, new song collections based on recorded sound included recordings of birdsong developed for research at Cornell University, the collection of non-Western music piled in the closets of the New School for Social Research by composer Henry Cowell, and the recordings of American folk songs made by the Lomax family in the late 1930s and 1940s.20
In a natural science dominated by the visual comparison of physical bodies, the phonograph provided a welcome “body” that, like a plant or animal, could be inspected with eyes as well as ears. In this context, recorded collections of sound can be profitably compared with photographs, for the two technologies had fundamentally different advantages from a research perspective. Photographs, unlike recordings, played a secondary, if valued, role in specimen collections. Museum dioramas of humans and animals served as models for photographs representing virtual images of nature that replaced uncaptured moments (and sometimes, as Aaron Glass points out, inspired the humans posing for diorama models to behave more “ethnically”).21 But from the perspective of dissection, morphology, and anatomy, replacing animal and cultural specimens with photographs meant a loss in information and the exchange of a primary source for a secondary one. Sound recording, in contrast, replaced in-the-field transcription with a perceived gain in information, exchanging secondary sources with something much more like a material artifact or “body.”
Collectors hailed the phonograph as a tool that would make song collections “a branch of science,” believing, like Fewkes, that this was music’s answer to visual culture.22 Historian Erica Brady has even suggested that the phonograph made possible the turn-of-the-century institutionalization of professional music ethnography.23 Yet collectors were often stymied by the practical drawbacks of this new technology. Pitch and rhythm changed depending on the speed of the playback machine, making it hard to know what a song really sounded like in its original performance—worst of all was an irregular machine, which altered the pitch in unpredictable ways.24 The British folk-song collector and composer Percy Grainger admitted that sometimes it was necessary to play a record hundreds of times to note down its details accurately, a process during which the record’s fragile wax body would have deteriorated.25
