Bela Bartók did an amazing thing by recording the folk music of the time on the wax cylinder phonographs. He allowed a very particular kind of history to be documented. We have so much of history in text. Quite a bit in visuals and sculpture. Yet sound was always recorded through other media, (notation, words, pictures) until the 19th century. Bartok’s explorations allowed a part of history to be documented in a unique way. I downloaded a few of his recordings from here. It is interesting how the technology itself ‘places’ our hearing of this in a time that’s past.