Records of the Sonic Exotic

When Laura Boulton travelled to the West Indies with her ornithologist husband in the 1930s, she intended to record the sounds of the islands she would visit. Her subjects were birds, musical instruments, and people, and her dedicated work habits produced thousands of recordings as well as a vast collection of musical instruments. Not yet inducted into the discipline of anthropology, she was a collector, sound technician, filmmaker and observer and she enjoyed a long and prodigious career both within and outside the academy. It is precisely the crossing of professional and disciplinary boundaries that generated the recordings and collections of elusive categorization. But the thread that runs through her career is a pursuit of what I call the sonic exotic. In tours and speeches throughout the US upon her return from her journeys, she developed this sonic exotic into a performance for crowds eager to witness, through a variety of sensory experiences, the distant and alluring. This paper sits at the intersection of sound studies and the history of anthropology in its interest in the production of knowledge about the exotic that so characterized early 20^th century ethnography.  In attending specifically to the production of sonic knowledge, it challenges the dominance of visual regimes and allows for an exploration of the epistemological relationships among natural history (birds), material culture (instruments) and ethnography (people) through sound.