Jaap Kunst claimed that „Ethno-musicology could never have grown into an independent science if the gramophone had not been invented“, thus emphasizing the importance of sound recordings for this academic field. The further development not only led to permanent improvements of the technological state-of-the-art but also to new ways of using recording devices. One example are so-called analytic as compared to standard documentary recordings. By employing playback techniques Simha Arom has expanded our reservoir of research strategies and also other scholars such as Ulrich Wegner and Nathalie Fernando-Marandola have used new technologies for ethnomusicological purposes. Computer-based techniques, like the re-synthesis of sounds and the modeling of complete musical parts, that have been explored in the Virtual Gamelan Graz project enable us to address issues that so far have been hard or even impossible to investigate.