Early Sound Archiving and the Making of Scientific Resources.

This essay focuses on the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, established in 1900, and its subsequent commitment to collecting music, voices, and sonic evidence from all over the world. But members of the archive managed to embrace the world as a resource in another respect as well: the daily production of cylinder records required large quantities of wax and various other materials that depended on a global system of supply and considerable exploitation of nature. The essay shows that the manufacture of the cylinders resonated with the research agendas developed at the Phonogramm-Archiv during the eras of the German Empire, World War I, German colonialism, and the Weimar Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]