Field recordings of different cultures and their music might seem purely anthropological today, even colonialist, but I suspect that back in the early 20th century, for those mostly without any previous means to encounter this music, there must have been genuine curiosity to hear these sounds. Early recording engineers could travel to the four corners of the globe with their primitive audio equipment to bring back music previously only heard by Europeans who were intrepid travellers, merchants, and explorers.
The USCB Cylinder Archive thankfully have a whole page detailing more about these Tahitian wax cylinder recordings. They explain that this collection of recordings are:
…Custom Blue Amberol recordings, possibly from a larger set of brown wax field recordings that were recorded in Faaone Tahiti, and possibly privately pressed as Blue Amberol cylinders by Edison in New Jersey. Recordings were possibly made by anthropologists Frank Stimson or Edward S. C. Handy in 1923. Four of the five cylinders are stamped “Tahiti-#” on the rim and handwritten notes on the boxes say “Himene Chorus, Faaone, Tahiti, 1923 (Handy)”.
They go on to say:
Himene is etymologically related to the word hymn and the sound these cylinders capture is a marriage of the vocal songs of native Tahitians and the sacred choral music that the European missionaries left behind. It is a haunting sound that retains its distance while remaining innately familiar.
By Robert Preinfalk – CC BY 2.0.
There certainly is something of the church hymn about these recorded songs, but with a very particular Pacific island flavour to it.
For this track, I cherry-picked certain melodies and phrases which caught my ear. The first involved a glitch rhythm track (a scratch on the cylinder) sampled as a kind of galloping double-beat, like a heartbeat with a 2/1-time signature, starting on an upbeat. This sample also included a satisfying looped vocal melody. Over this, I sampled an ear-catching phrase with another soaring vocal melody tacked on the end. All of this was then processed and worked on to create the more spacious sound of a much larger chorus.
For about a minute, I let this wax cylinder remix play until my guitars come in with some expansive reverb. For this kind of reverberating, dreamy sound, my pink Stratocaster, Debbie, was perfect.
The guitar additions awash with all that delay and reverb, provided a psychedelic, dreamy tone. I imitated part of the main melody but even that part not too closely as I wanted a suggestion of the theme, rather than just direct imitation of it. As mentioned in a previous post, I adopted my usual twin-guitar approach, making used of two interweaving melodies and sounds.
With the sounds of our Tahitian vocalists flowing along, the dreamy wash of my Stratocaster, Debbie, plays out the rest of this track with its exotic sensation of the South Seas.
“Tahitian Field Recording” is now available from the Carnoe’s Mummingbirds Bandcamp site.
Carnoe's Mummingbirds 
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