ABSTRACT
The scientific world began applying analytical technology to African music in 1905, when Parker F. Witte used a cylinder phonograph to record musical performances in Togo. Over the next decades, several important collections followed. European scholars, notably Erich M . von Hornbostel (1917), transcribed the cylinders and used the transcriptions to support hypotheses about African music (1928). But these cylinders, and the transcriptions they yielded, treated performance holistically, registering music only as it presented itself to the phonograph. They were less than fully adequate to the task, which required specific technical tools. The music was too complex, the machinery too simple. In particular, intricacies of rhythm and pitch invited the development of new technological devices.
