e traveled for 15 months to what was then Yugoslavia, and discovered guslars — or “singers of tales,” as he would call them — practicing a still-living oral tradition. Their songs of weddings and war performed in cafes (and, later, in a traveling studio of Parry’s devising) provided living proof that his theory about the composition of the Homeric epics was, in fact, possible in practice. In the process, he created a new audio device to record long songs on aluminum disks, now housed at Harvard University. This fieldwork marked, in the estimation of many, the beginning of the discipline of “sound studies,” showing that poetry could be song and epic, a performance.