Open Methods for Digital Conservation of Historic Musical Instruments

Abstract

As the harvesting of materials that are traditionally used for building musical instruments become more tightly regulated, we need to look at how we can continue to study and preserve historic musical instruments. Preserving musical instruments digitally is one solution, but raises questions on how we might continue to study and interact with them. We must also consider the problem of how to make the tools authored for digital conservation maintainable and accessible.

This talk discusses work carried out at the NEMUS project on the topic of digital conservation of historic stringed instruments with three themes: Measurement, Analysis and Interaction.

"Measurement" considers the risks during the measurement process, particularly to historic stringed instrument soundboards. As such, non-contact laser Doppler velocimetry methods for measuring vibration are appealing, but are prohibitively expensive.

"Analysis" focuses on the creation of an open source framework for interacting with a novel finite difference scheme for plates under general elastic boundary conditions.

"Interaction" looks at preserving the sensory experience of playing a historic instrument after it has been digitised, in particular 17th century harpsichords.

Speaker Biography

Matthew is a twice graduate from the University of Edinburgh in Acoustics and Music Technology, an apprenticed luthier, and currently a researcher as part of the NEMUS project at the University of Bologna. Matthew's research interest lie at the intersection between research software engineering, creative applications of computer programming pedagogy, interfaces for musical expression and numerical simulation for sonic art.

Event Information

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Host or Publisher Edinburgh Futures Institute