Our aim here is to take a first step in research on the epistemic challenges that sound archiving has posed within and between the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences since the late nineteenth century—and even more so since the availability of digital sound archives and tools for sound analysis. In doing so, the Special Issue posits and demonstrates the benefits of carrying out carefully contextualized microhistories of the configuration and reconfiguration of particular sound technologies under distinct historical conditions, specifying their social-spatial relations with actors, objects, sites, and settings. We believe that more historical work remains to be done on the multilayered relationship between sound data, archives, and the formation of disciplines and scholarly networks—not to mention its relevance for a well-informed provenance research on sound archival objects.