From the Object to the Hyperlink. Key Moments in the History of Field Recording Distribution

GARCÍA, MIGUEL ANGEL

Bruselas

Congreso; 24th Meeting of the Study Group on Historical Sources (ICTM Belgium); 2022

Musical Instrument Museum (Brussels), KU Leuven, and Africa Museum (Tervuren)

In the early XX century, wax cylinders –blank or recorded- were carried to the places where they were needed by animal-powered means of transport -mules, horses, carts, - or by boat. With the appearance of records and the magnetic tape, the possibility of copying recordings increased, and with the new means of transport and communication, its circulation grew. One of the most significant events was the advent of sound digital inscription and the concomitant appearance of new formats (DAT, minidisc, CD, etc.). A later nodal transformation was the replacement of the track by the file, that it so say, the replacement of a discrete sound inscription segment by a high-capacity byte disaggregation, aggregation and distribution storage unit. Among audio file formats, MP3 was, as Jonathan Sterne has expressed, a triumph of distribution: “A single file on a single network may be available simultaneously in dozens of countries, without regard for local laws, policies, or licensing agreements” (2012: 1). Another decisive event in MPE and the other digital reproduction and circulation formats was the creation, in the early 1980s, of the “informatics network of networks”: The Internet. The progressive expansion of the virtual environment gave rise to a vertiginous increase in sound recording circulation, which had as main protagonists downloading, streaming, platforms, Web servers, personal devices, and hyperlinks, among other technological developments. The paper constitutes a first attempt at historicizing the distribution of field recordings among collectors, institutions, and institutions and collectors. The concept of distribution embraces aspects related to means of transport, the copying capacity of the different formats, reproduction and communication technologies, accessibility policies, and marketing strategies, among others. The focus is on sound distribution as a sequence which comprises physical objects, digital objects and hyperlinks, and on the virtual environment and in the processes of centralization, decentralization, and commoditization of sound recordings associated to that environment.