Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America and the Birth of the Science Series
by Craig Eley
Originally published in the Fall/Winter 2012 edition of the Smithsonian Folkways Magazine.
In the fall of 1951, Moses Asch was asked by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to create a soundtrack for their upcoming exhibit, Men of the Montaña. Focusing on a group of eight Peruvian tribes that one reporter identified as "the hillbillies of the Upper Amazon," the exhibit was promoted as the first time that recorded sound had been used to accompany a museum exhibit. The results were an overwhelming success; it would go on to be the longest running special exhibit in the museum's history, and the New York Times lauded it for its "unusual use" of color, sound, lighting, and arrangement. But the sound component was more unusual than most visitors would ever know. Asch's "Peruvian" soundtrack did not come from Peru at all, but from locations in Panama, Connecticut, the Bronx Zoo, and a Manhattan bathtub. With the success of the exhibit, Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America was commercially released the following year, as the first installment in the Folkways Science Series.1
The Folkways Science Series was built, like so many other aspects of the Folkways collection, with the help of a variety of outside recordists and specialists. For the first Science Series record, Asch enlisted the help of Cornell ornithologist Peter Paul Kellogg, a recording pioneer in his own right for his work with birds in the 1930s. In a letter to Kellogg dated September 18, 1951, Asch details his vision for the series:
I am very much interested in issuing a series of ‘nature and science’ records in which I will attempt to reproduce the sounds within the content of time etc. and in the drama inherent therein, rather than in the way it has been done up to now of identifying each sound by the spoken word, description.
This seemingly simple idea was actually a dramatic shift in how nature records were produced and understood. The older model was based on a traditional in-person science lecture, with a professional who would announce and often describe what listeners were about to hear. This model did not go away overnight; in fact, many Science Series records employed it through the 1970s. But Asch no longer wanted to reproduce lectures, he wanted to use the medium of sound and the material of nature to create a sonic narrative.
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1 1952; FX 6120.
