Given infinite voices and a finite lifetime, whom do we choose to listen to? My lecture amplifies the voices of two female ethnomusicologists, composers, and educators, Mady Humbert-Lavergne (1898–1987) and Brigitte Schiffer (1909–1986), exploring their unconventional lives and ideas between Berlin, Paris, and Cairo and asking how they challenged the mindset of their era’s music ethnology. I open the box of my audio research praxis to unpack recirculated recordings from Berlin archives, letters written over decades, and a speculative musical set-up in Cairo involving an early electronic instrument, the ondes Martenot.
