The following passage is adapted from an essay on nineteenth-century technology and folklore.
[1] For generations, scholars defined oral storytelling by its fluid, impermanent nature. A traditional teller did not recite a fixed text; rather, they recreated the narrative in real time, tailoring the pacing, vocabulary, and thematic emphasis to the immediate feedback of the audience. This dynamic feedback loop meant that a tale was never performed the same way twice. The vitality of oral culture lay precisely in this mutability, which allowed stories to evolve alongside the communities that shared them.
[2] The invention of the phonograph in the late nineteenth century promised to disrupt this ephemeral art. Early ethnographers, convinced that industrialization was rapidly eroding indigenous cultures, rushed into rural communities equipped with wax cylinders. To these researchers, the recording horn was an instrument of historical salvation. It offered a means to capture the 'authentic' voice of the storyteller, translating a transient acoustic event into a permanent, objective artifact that could be archived and analyzed indefinitely.
[3] However, the physical constraints of the technology immediately interfered with the performance. The standard wax cylinder could record only two to three minutes of sound, forcing storytellers to severely compress narratives that traditionally unfolded over hours. Furthermore, the isolation required for recording—speaking directly into a metal horn in a silent room—severely severed the teller from the audience. Stripped of the responsive crowd, storytellers lost the prompts that guided their improvisation, resulting in stiff, abbreviated monologues that bore little resemblance to live performances.
[4] Over time, the presence of these recordings began to reshape the oral tradition itself. As subsequent generations of storytellers listened to the archives, they came to view the frozen, truncated versions on the wax cylinders as the authoritative versions of the myths. The technology designed to preserve the living voice of folklore instead began to standardize it, transforming a fluid performance art into a static, unchanging canon.
Which of the following best describes how the third paragraph functions in relation to the second paragraph?
- It presents a counterpoint to the optimistic expectations of the ethnographers described in the second paragraph by illustrating how the recording medium corrupted the art form it sought to save.Answer
- BIt offers technical specifications that explain why the ethnographers mentioned in the second paragraph chose the phonograph over writing to document oral tales.
- CIt details the chronological sequence of fieldwork steps that ethnographers followed after obtaining the wax cylinders described in the second paragraph.
- DIt defends the storytellers' preference for live performances over the technological archiving methods advocated by the researchers in the second paragraph.