Since November 2007, the Department of Music Ethnology of the Ethnological Museum is being presented in a newly designed exhibition.

The phonogram archive comprises more than 16,000 original recordings and around 2,000 shellac records from all kinds of regions of the world.

The beginnings of the Berlin phonogram archive - and thus the origins of the subject of music ethnology - reach back to the year 1900, when the psychologist Carl Stumpf used an Edison phonograph to record a group of Thai theatre musicians performing in Berlin.

In the summer of 1999, the collection of Edison cylinders kept at the phonogram archive was listed in the UNESCO register "Memory of the World".

Following the tradition of the Berlin phonogram archive, the Department of Music Ethnology at the Ethnological Museum continues to document music culture from around the world. Today, however, modern technology is employed. The archive's holdings have grown to over 150,000 sound recordings.