With the invention of the phonograph in 1877, the sound not only became a museum artifact in the European ethnological context, but this invention also offered new opportunities for scholars in their attempt to study the so-called "primitive cultures". In this attempt, European ethnologists claimed that the cultures of these so-called "primitive people" were meant to disappear because of their contact with Europe. Therefore, the main purpose of ethnological museums and sound archives in the early 20th century was to collect as many objects of culture as possible from all over the world, especially from non-European areas. In this logic, the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv worked together with, for example, ethnologists, linguists, musicologist and colonial officers to acquire as many non-European sound recordings as possible. German colonial officers and many other actors, who were not qualified for ethnomusicological field work, took on the role of ethnologists, collecting objects, making a large number of sound recordings and producing/constructing knowledge on colonized people. This paper attempts to suggest important background information to consider today while dealing with this acoustic heritage issued from German colonial contexts. While suggesting the prolegomena to the study of historical sound recordings from colonial contexts and discussing the principles of the recording practice, the paper contextualizes these recordings as traces of a "colonial ear", which means a constructed acoustic representation of the "other".