Question

Read the following passage carefully.

The advent of the phonograph in the late nineteenth century promised to revolutionize the study of comparative musicology by providing an ostensibly objective record of acoustic phenomena. Prior to this, scholars relying entirely on direct auditory transcription into standard Western notation were frequently accused of assimilating unfamiliar musical syntaxes into the restrictive parameters of European diatonicism. However, as mid-twentieth-century ethnomusicologists such as Charles Seeger later argued, the phonograph did not eliminate the epistemological crisis of transcription; it merely displaced it. Seeger distinguished between "prescriptive" transcription—which functions as a set of directions for a performer already conversant with the musical tradition—and "descriptive" transcription, which attempts to communicate the physical realities of a performance to an outsider.

Early phonograph researchers, operating under the assumption that the machine captured a pure, unmediated sonic reality, often produced descriptive transcriptions of unprecedented visual complexity. They employed a proliferation of diacritical marks to indicate microtonal pitch variations and rhythmic fluctuations that eluded standard notation. Yet, these hyper-detailed transcriptions frequently obscured the underlying structural grammar of the music. A performer relying on such a transcription would become bogged down in reproducing idiosyncratic performance artifacts—a vocalist's momentary clearing of the throat, or a slight rhythmic delay caused by physical exhaustion—rather than grasping the essential melodic contour.

Furthermore, the sheer visual density of these descriptive transcriptions paradoxically reinforced Western ethnocentrism. Because the standard Western staff remained the foundational grid upon which these complex diacritical modifications were mapped, the music was visually represented not as an autonomous system with its own coherent logic, but as a continuous series of "deviations" from a European normative standard. Consequently, later scholars argued for a return to simpler, though admittedly less acoustically precise, transcriptions that abstracted the essential structural elements of a performance, acknowledging that a transcription can only ever serve as an analytical model.

Which one of the following does the passage most strongly support regarding the "idiosyncratic performance artifacts" mentioned in the second paragraph?