A Siren in a Paper Sleeve

Still from Ghost World, by Terry Zwigoff.

I am a record collector. The type of disc with which I am obsessed, the 78-rpm phonograph record, is made of slowly decaying organic materials, bound together and coated with synthetic compounds. John Blacking, a pioneering ethnomusicologist of the twentieth century, proposed that music is a “humanly organized sound,” a pat yet inclusive definition. Like most of the music he studied