Field Recordings

In the pre-recording age, written notation was the technology that allowed the dissemination and preservation of music. But before the age of recording, music from Tonga (and other Pacific Islands) was transcribed or written down in Western notation by Europeans on Captain Cook's second voyage to the South Pacific (1772-1775). With the advent of recording technology, the wax cylinders invented by Thomas Edison were used to record music in Africa and Hungary among other places. The invention of audiocassette recording in 1966 has greatly facilitated this activity. Today field recording has become a specialized activity of historical preservation usually undertaken by ethnomusicologists. The goal is to record those orally transmitted musical traditions that have not been tainted by Western mass media culture. Originally conceived as scholarly activities, field recordings in themselves have come to have some mass appeal.