Preserving the possibility of inquiry

Musical instruments are physical objects, historical witnesses and systems of action. Their sounding behavior depends on material, construction, configuration, room and use. Digitization brings these perspectives together, but also introduces choices about what to measure and how to represent it.

Two translations#

The first translation moves from an instrument and its sources into a digital representation. The second turns that representation into something a person can hear, explore or play. Each stage selects, transforms and leaves things out.

Three guiding questions#

• What must be documented for a representation to remain scientifically interpretable?
• How can heterogeneous sources and measurements be related without hiding disagreement?
• How can interactive access retain the boundaries and uncertainties of its evidence?

MODAVIS connects these questions through research data infrastructure, a semantic model and the Virtual Acoustic Object standard. Pipe organs serve as a demanding principal case; the models distinguish instrument-neutral concepts from organ-specific ones.

Why organs make the problem visible#

An organ brings many scales of evidence into one instrument: a named workshop, a building, changing configurations, mechanisms, individual pipes and recorded sound. A later intervention may preserve a case while altering its contents, or preserve pipes while changing their relationships. An undifferentiated record cannot express those histories adequately.

The digital object introduces further choices. A photograph can document a surviving arrangement, a model can reconstruct a proposed earlier state, and a recording can capture a particular session in a particular room. Placing them next to one another is useful only if the reader can see which relationships are established and which are interpretative.

Three connected research contributions#

What would make a result convincing?#

Different claims require different evidence. File checks can establish fixity. A replay can establish that a documented procedure produces the expected output under specified conditions. A numerical comparison can assess a model against observations. None of those alone establishes an attribution to a historical maker or a listener’s judgement of authenticity. The notebooks therefore describe both the contribution and the level at which it has been examined.

Choose a question before choosing a representation#

A question about historical tuning requires different evidence from a question about spatial access or the ergonomics of a virtual console. Begin with the property to investigate, the object state and the comparison that could support an answer. Then choose the recording, geometric, documentary or interactive representation. This makes omissions visible early: a beautiful exterior scan does not provide internal dimensions, and a playable sample set does not establish how an original action felt.