Modeling – Imaginative Descriptions of Real Things: Learning About Historical Musical Instrument-Making Practices from New Technologies

Abstract

Historical musical instrument studies, particularly when framed as organology, have tended to focus on the physical specifics of individual instruments. This article starts from a position in which musical instruments are thought of as a nexus of information: of history of course, of materials certainly, but most of all of ideas. In addition to providing new types of material evidence, digital technologies afford new opportunities for gathering, representing, and interpreting information that might have a considerable impact on our understanding of historical data. Contemporary technologies of modeling and data comparison afford approaches to the interpretation of, for example, the output and goals of a particular workshop, maker, or city that suggest that the study of multiple instruments may be instructive and valuable. Working from a larger data set potentially allows for both greater accuracy and greater subtlety of interpretation. This article will examine both the broad implications of such methodological change and the practical ramifications of learning from modeling multiple instruments.

Historical musical instrument studies, particularly when framed as organology, have tended to focus on the physical specifics of individual instruments. This article starts from a position in which musical instruments are thought of as a nexus of information: of history of course, of materials certainly, but most of all of ideas. In addition to providing new types of material evidence, digital technologies afford new opportunities for gathering, representing, and interpreting information that might have a considerable impact on our understanding of historical data. Contemporary technologies of modeling and data comparison afford approaches to the interpretation of, for example, the output and goals of a particular workshop, maker, or city that suggest that the study of multiple instruments may be instructive and valuable. Working from a larger data set potentially allows for both greater accuracy and greater subtlety of interpretation. This article will examine both the broad implications of such methodological change and the practical ramifications of learning from modeling multiple instruments. In the spirit of Wistreich and Rossi Rognoni (2024) it suggests that the speculative boundaries of organology can be broadened by understanding the implications of new tools, and that these tools may be as much conceptual as material.

Modeling is a key concept here. It involves taking things out of the physical domain into an imaginative space in which things are malleable. The implications of this commonplace of thought in relation to interactions between humans and computers have yet to be adequately explored with regard to musical instrument histories. It becomes possible, for example, to propose an instrument that is the algorithmic mean of thirty different surviving flutes by the same maker; ¹ to hybridize a Thomas Lot with a Thomas Stanesby; or to attempt to identify or track over time the precise effects of incremental changes in design.

Modeling combined with 3D printing brings with it the ease of testing hypotheses. The precision with which multiple instances can be replicated, and the ease with which individual features (bore variations, tonehole undercut, wall thickness) can be isolated and incrementally adjusted allows for rapid assessment of the contribution and significance of each design change (intentional or otherwise), both in principle and in situ. Such rapid prototyping, where each feature can be entirely decoupled from others, is not really feasible with even the best handmade instruments, though the tacit knowledge accumulated over time by makers of such instruments may undoubtedly produce similar insights; indeed 3D modeling may allow the testing and evaluation of “ad hoc” principles gleaned from such makers.

In the museum context, or in the restorer's or repairer's workshop, “new” technologies allow the rapid fabrication of missing, damaged, or altered parts for instruments, based on acoustic models or on alternative sources. “New” technologies therefore also afford comparison between altered and hypothetical unaltered states. ² The analysis of multiple surviving corps-de-rechange for flutes might afford the scaling of new corps for such instruments, but beyond this it might allow the development of a sense of a given workshop's acoustic understanding. We have access to (and can begin to reverse engineer) some of the assumptions and tacit knowledge involved in the process of the design of a particular group of instruments.

Beyond hypothetical completions of incomplete or damaged instruments, the ease of modeling and duplicating damaged or vulnerable parts of instruments enables their practical testing in situations where risks might otherwise be perceived as unacceptable, because such risks can be substantially reduced or alleviated (e.g., establishing the working pitch of flutes with ivory heads, which often have internal cracking to the bore, preventing safe use).

The very notion of modeling (in the sense associated with 3D printing) can be usefully placed within the context of digital tools for modeling more broadly which impact on musical study. These might include tools for multi-dimensional representation and analysis of data, as used for example by Mollie Ables (2017) for social network analysis in her study of interactions between musicians and institutions in renaissance Venice, and more pertinently here in my own study of connectivities between woodwind instrument workshops in late 18th and early 19th century London (Waters, 2020). They might also include new tools for the forensic analysis of materials, affording sophisticated interpretation and analysis of origins and dating sequences (e.g., Brostoff et al., 2022). And through the capacity for detailed online archival searches, in combination with the vast numbers of historic instruments uncovered through on- and offline auctions, the data sets that are available for analysis become immensely larger and thus likely to afford more accurate interpretations.

At this point, in imitation of Barbara Maria Stafford's (1991) deployment of a series of verbs in her influential study of medicine, it might be productive to take a similar approach here, as verbs usefully emphasize the activities with which we’re concerned: with making; with measuring; with calibrating, interpreting, modeling, representing, replicating or duplicating (just what is a copy?); with incrementing, decoupling, collecting, standardizing, and compensating; with selling, and with speculating. Many of the contributors to this publication are specialists in one or more of these areas. My contribution here is as an inexpert, a synthesist, and my goal is to bring some of these ideas and processes together in what I hope might be a fruitful manner.

Speculating

I will both begin and end with speculating, and a capacity for speculation should not preclude current debate about the role of the museum and the nature and location of expertise. For some centuries we have been secure in the assumption that national organizations – museums, libraries, broadcasting companies, academic institutions – will be able to continue to sustain and moderate custodianship and stewardship of their “content,” whether this be physical or intellectual. But new modes of governance, unpredictabilities in funding, and the internet bring about a redistribution of knowledge and power. In this world of more distributed expertise, what is the role of, for example, a national musical instrument collection? How, if at all, does it set about maintaining a role, or instigating new modes of research and knowledge? “Digital access” will doubtless develop roles beyond merely listing objects. What might some of these be? ³

Perhaps the notion that archiving is separable from making might be worth questioning here, as museums move beyond recording the physical presence and condition of objects to speculating about the various states of objects in their multiple and changing contexts of use. Making that very speculation public (in the form of models that draw attention to competing modes of interpretation) might be a significant change in the politics of the museum – where interpretation has usually been imposed. This is a crucial shift in a world where expertise is increasingly distributed. As the conservator of a national museum service said to me in a recent conference: “You have to realize that we manage millions of objects, and of these less than one percent might be music-related. We can no longer be expected to be the source of expertise on all of the items in our care.” ⁴ Perhaps museums will emerge as braver: showing what they don’t know and explicitly inviting solutions from outside; devising new strategies in which networks of disparate expert individuals can interact with and contribute to such institutions.

Measuring

One area that might seem unassailable, absolute, and far from speculation is measuring, but the act of measuring is beset by ideology and assumption. The idea that we abstract measurement into standardized units would have been familiar to an 18^th century maker, but not necessarily the fundamental mode of address of a possibly non-literate journeyman in a woodwind workshop, who would have been more likely to “put the joint on this reamer up to this mark here” than to check that the internal bore at the end of the joint was 11.35 mm, or to “begin the external bulge for the socket two fingers’ breadth in” rather than at 1^1/2 inches. Likewise a knowledge that instruments were made in batches and that some workshops (such as those of Kirst and Potter) cut small indicator marks on the tenons, sockets, or keys and blocks of each instrument within a batch, tells us that there was an assumption that degrees of variation within a batch were of an order that made such distinctions helpful or necessary. ⁵ That consistent reproducibility was an important factor in the economics of woodwind instrument production in the early 18th century is evident from, for example, inventories taken at the death of prominent makers. Patrick Urquhart is known from five surviving instruments bearing his name. ⁶ This apparent paucity of survivals does not, however, indicate an “artisanal” scale of production. The inventory taken at his death in 1729 records 686 unfinished recorders, 58 transverse flutes, 89 small recorders, and 10 oboes, along with additional bass recorders and bassoons, valued at somewhere between £300,000 and £2.5 million in contemporary terms.

In the context of measuring for modeling, there is an assumption that absolute measurements are possible, or even desirable, but paradoxically these are increasingly obtained using a computer tomography (CT) scanner that uses algorithmic determinations of where materials begin and end, then represents this data in visual form using a further level of algorithmic intervention. ⁷ How does one calibrate such measuring devices? To how many transductions and transformations is such data subject? And how transparent is this to those using the equipment and the data? (who are often not the same people, which is why we have radiographers and radiologists: one who measures, while another diagnoses).

Interpreting

Which brings us to interpreting. I’d contend that measurements made without the interpretive input of a maker are likely to be of limited use – like allowing the radiographer to diagnose. A number of recent projects in 3D printing and modeling have been flawed by starting with a damaged or inadequate instrument and not correcting these obvious faults with expert knowledge. Any resulting comparative tests are therefore without much academic value – though they may be useful and important public relations exercises for the institutions involved. Careful measurements “in the hand” tempered by cautious but informed interpretation may be as, or more, accurate for some types of data than those obtained using more complex measuring technologies. In the latter other issues such as the expense and time involved may prove to be an influence, whereas in doing it by hand, measurement and interpretation are simultaneous and integrated.

Moving beyond measurements to modeling, where data is algorithmically fashioned into an intermediary state, imagination and interpretation come into play as the modeler selects the most appropriate of multiple potential strategies (“tools”) to build the virtual model. This is beset by judgements and draws on expert knowledge, often tacit in nature. It has been instructive to observe my co-researcher, Zexuan Qiao, ⁸ experiment with different means to interpret the measured drawings I’ve given him. Often discussions of how best to achieve a particular outcome are influenced by a knowledge of the original manufacturing processes. As an instance, by returning to and modeling the original manufacturing methods, we were able to replicate digitally the characteristic double undercut of the fingerholes of a Richard Potter flute, constructing virtual fraise models to emulate the manner in which this was originally achieved (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

CAD modeling of “fraise” tool used in undercutting toneholes of Potter flutes. Image by kind permission of Zexuan Qiao.

Having overcome the many levels of interpretation necessary to come to a functional 3D model, the business of compensation and recalibration is not over, as all manufacturing processes introduce their own characteristic non-linearities, and for additive printing processes we have to learn these and make allowances just as any other craftsman would as they sophisticate their relationship with the making process. 3D printing may be wonderfully predictable and repeatable if the conditions of making stay the same, but there are still characteristic peculiarities. The direction of the print (with respect to gravity) is significant, because the melted filaments of material are subject to “settlement” in the direction of the print. Most measurements on a 3D print are marginally smaller than on the CAD model. One can introduce a nominal percentage of shrinkage compensation to cope with this, but not only does the print shrink as it hardens: It does so in a non-linear manner, influenced both by gravity and the viscosity, mass, and intended thickness of the material at any given point. For woodwind instruments this can mean, for example, that the external diameter of undercut fingerholes may be smaller due to the proportionally increased shrinkage of particularly thin areas of printing. This could be dealt with by hand-finishing, but if one purpose of our study is reproducibility, it might be more important to compensate for this (consistently) in the model, rather than inconsistently by hand-finishing, in order that any comparisons that we are studying remain undistorted.

Of course compensation is part of any manufacturing process, but, as noted earlier, it's also a necessary response to physical changes to original instruments. Tenon compression, ⁹ for example, is a feature of many historic woodwinds: Some alteration of bore dimensions is almost ubiquitous, the degree depending on the materials involved.

Copying

Then we come to replicating and duplicating: to the thorny question of “What is a copy?” 3D modeling and additive printing techniques can become an important practical and theoretical tool in the investigation of the notion of copying, of replication, of reproducing. ¹⁰ Each of these terms carries slightly different ideological baggage, often evident in how they are used linguistically – “just a copy,” “an exact replica,” – but is also subject to change over time and to subtleties of use within different communities. “Copying” often brings with it the flavor of imitation, pretense, or mimicry. ¹¹ In academia plagiarism is absolutely proscribed. Paradoxically, new technologies are often introduced into societies with the promise of “perfect reproduction every time” – think of the photocopier, or even of the photograph – and 3D modeling/printing are no different. But each new technology brings gains and losses – the situation is never neutral. There is inevitably initial inexpertise with regard to how the new technology works, what it encodes, what it does well, and how it differs from previous technologies and methods used. The ideology informing the business of copying can have a profound effect on the result.

An example: When Japanese factories in the late 1970s realized that electric guitars made by Fender in the 1950s and early ’60s were far more valued and expensive on the secondhand market than those from the later ’60s or even than newly manufactured guitars, they bought a handful of the older instruments and set about copying them. They operated on the principle that they were unsure precisely what aspects of these older instruments made them better or more desirable, so they began to copy every detail, including aspects that resulted from “imperfections” in manufacture. They replicated aspects that had not previously been regarded as relevant in electric guitar making: the precise alloys used in the pick-up magnets, irregularities in orientation and tension in the wire-winding of the pickups, the weight and density of the wood used in the bodies of the instruments, the thin and fragile “nitro” finish that resulted from Fender's use of automobile paints on early guitars to keep costs down, the tighter radius curve used on the fingerboards of the earlier instruments. The copies that resulted became so commercially successful that they not only threatened Fender's mass market in Japan but were imported into the US. After taking legal action to suppress the copies, Fender then began using the same strategy themselves, even using the same factories, such as FujiGen, to produce the replicas of their own earlier guitars. ¹² By the end of the 1990s such Japanese-made instruments from the early 1980s had themselves acquired a mystique and desirability, which led them to become valuable and highly regarded. It can be argued that this particular instance of copying had a profound effect on subsequent electric guitar making practices.

The increasingly sophisticated understanding of electric guitar making extended to the (literally) superficial: to copying the look. For over 30 years it has been possible to buy “reliced” guitars with various degrees of simulated aging and wear; some of these are meticulous reproductions of older guitars from the 1950s and ’60s owned by famous guitarists. It's possible to buy a generic Chinese-made copy of a Gibson Les Paul guitar now for $150, or to buy a (Gibson-made) reproduction of Jimmy Page's favorite 1959 model with every scratch meticulously replicated for $35,000, a price ratio of around 25:1. This differential can rise to over 100:1 when the instrument in question is an original 1959 instrument. Of course, a concern with replicating “finish” has long been part of violin making. ¹³ I note that recently some makers of “historical” flutes have started to make copies of dark-stained I H Rottenburgh flutes with the stain removed around the fingerholes to emulate the originals in their current worn condition.

To return to guitars, in legal and functional terms, both the $150 and the $35,000 guitar are copies, replicas, which exhibit not only varying degrees of accuracy but also varying ideologies about where and how much effort is expended upon different aspects of the reproduction. So much of instrument making – particularly of the time taken – is in small details of alignment or calibrating to a player's requirements. I have witnessed a skilled maker investing one day's work and an investment in new parts of around $300 on an instrument costing around $300 and making it functionally comparable to one on sale for considerably more than 10 times the price. Paradoxically, an instrument calibrated to one particular player's requirements is often likely to have broader appeal than an instrument set up for a generic “user.” ¹⁴ As Rodger et al. (2020) phrase it: “Musicians are too varying to allow for the characterization of a typical user.” This insight is increasingly common in the human–computer interaction (HCI)-informed world of experimental instrument making, particularly where electronics are involved, but is equally portable to the experience of acoustic instruments.

One of the paradoxes of good musical instruments is that they are technologies designed to do something, which enable the player to do something else: to operate beyond the design brief. They are made not only for music that already exists but must also afford that which has not yet been conceived. This is not just about different permutations – it's about conceptually entirely different goals. Though instruments may embody one kind of knowledge and history, they are not limited to it; indeed in some sense the real design of the instrument takes place inside the player (who, along with the situation or environment, is part of the instrument system).

Performers on copies of historical instruments frequently observe that copies of different historical instruments by the same maker appear to share many qualities of response, often more so than copies which purport to be of the same instrument but by different makers. (Rod Cameron's flutes feel and sound like Rod Cameron flutes, but “copies” by different makers of Bart Kuijken's Rottenburgh flute vary considerably in their response). This tells us that the tacit knowledge and assumptions of an individual maker (or practices within a particular workshop) have a palpable effect on the instrument's performance, irrespective of the fact that they may start with similar measurements. And contemporary makers may be guided as strongly by commercial concerns as by those of “literal” replication, so pitches of individual notes may be altered to conform to 21st century conceptions of accurate tuning, or ease of response. These may be framed as interpretations of the original model, or more bluntly as “corrections.” ¹⁵

That different makers may approach similar design issues with differences of focus or priority, is illustrated by Jan Bouterse (n.d.) who contrasts the representational strategies used on paper by a number of prominent makers of historically informed recorders to represent the voicing details of the instruments. Essentially, there are so many variables that the choice of which measurements form the referent for the others can subtly alter the apparent geometry of the structure. This complexity was confirmed in subsequent conversation with recorder maker Bodil Diesen, ¹⁶ who proposed that 3D printing might offer a quick means of testing different approaches to voicing recorders, as 3D printed copies of recorder bodies could be cheaply sent to different makers, thus decoupling the issue of body design and response from that of the headjoint voicing. Diesen noted that museums that did not allow skilled makers to temporarily remove the blocks of original recorders were effectively preventing the harvesting of crucial design elements of the instrument.

As already noted, modeling and 3D printing potentially remove considerable levels of risk identified by conservators in testing the qualities of certain historical instruments, but they also provoke a reframing of the challenges to some of that institutionally sanctioned ideology of “risk.” The Diesen example above highlights the risk (of a different type) that instrument-borne information is permanently lost because instruments are removed from certain forms of use and continuing entanglement with expert humans. This issue is addressed by Howard (2022) in terms of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Howard draws attention to the cultural ideologies at play in valuing (or fetishizing) cultural objects at the expense of understanding or preserving the skills embodied in (producing) them.

Personal Research Examples

In our own small practical research project, Qiao and I have drawn on the principles outlined above, attempting to think of musical instruments as a nexus of information: of history, of materials and most of all of ideas. At one level our activities function as an investigation of what is, and is not, transferred in the act of “copying.” These flute-related projects described run in parallel to Qiao's own, more substantial, research on border pipes, ¹⁷ and the two investigations inform each other. Our assumption is that the instruments afford us glimpses of the tools used to make them, physical, conceptual and even ideological. We’re beginning to speculate about how much makers/manufacturers understood theoretically about acoustics, pre-Helmholtz, and how much was empirical. We’re as interested in what isn’t replicated by using contemporary techniques and ideas as what is.

The first project involved copying the Rippert flute in Glasgow. ¹⁸ This is a beautiful, rare instrument of high-quality manufacture, but clearly shortened and with a considerably enlarged embouchure. It was an ideal candidate with which to assess the capacities of 3D print and modeling's capacity to restore something like original condition. The result was perhaps the most impressive sounding, free-blowing instrument we have yet made, but with tuning idiosyncrasies we didn’t anticipate, which probably come from relying too heavily on someone else's measurements and interpretation.

Our second project was the Urquhart flute in Edinburgh (MIMEd3370), an instrument the importance of which had not been recognized. It is one of the earliest four-part London-made flutes in existence – dating from before 1728 and probably considerably earlier – and is well made and in good condition. The choice of the instrument coincided with the publication of Waters (2021), which provided some evidence for Montagu's (1988) theory that Urquhart might have been the maker of Bressan's instruments in London. Again we relied on previously available measurements. The first iteration of the flute played well but with unreliable tuning, and when compared with the original, the distortions of fingerhole dimensions caused by printing were evident. Various copies of a second iteration were made in which some of our own measurements were substituted, which improved both sound and tuning but insufficiently. Jean-François Beaudin has subsequently remeasured the instrument and we will work on a third iteration.

The third project involved copying a series of instruments by Thomas Stanesby Junior, including the ex-McGegan instrument in Edinburgh (MIMEd6225), an instrument in the Dayton Miller collection (DCM1125), and an instrument in the Horniman museum (14.5.47/241) (Figure 2). These were chosen because Stanesby Junior's instruments have already been identified (Bigio & Wright, 2005) as remarkably consistent, especially in bore profile and fingerhole disposition. The instruments are all in good condition except that the embouchure of the Dayton Miller instrument has been enlarged. Publicly available drawings of this instrument (by Jean-François Beaudin) already suggest the original embouchure dimensions for this (Stanesby's embouchure designs are also notably consistent). The purpose here was comparative: to test incremental changes in various aspects of Stanesby's design. Given the relative stability of bore and fingerhole layout, we wished to evaluate small variations in position and cut of embouchure, to compare headjoints with cylindrical bores with those in which the conicity appears to begin in the headjoint, and to evaluate small variations in the position of the back-bore reaming of the footjoint. A standardized socket/tenon size was used for each joint to “modularize”: to compare performance of hybrid entities or of replacing one part with an incrementally different one (affording some degree of decoupling of elements). This technique mimics Qiao's already established practice of standardizing the stock sizes, sockets, and tenons of small bagpipes in order to interchange chanters and drones from different pipe models to explore issues of performance and balance (both physical and acoustic). The result was a series of remarkably consistent, compact-toned instruments with good tuning but less projection than expected. Absence of the back-boring of the foot makes some parts of the instrument very unresponsive in the upper register, but altering the position at which this bore expansion occurs appears not to be so critical. The instruments appear to “take on the character” of each headjoint used, but with the relative tuning and response determined by the body and foot joints. Surprisingly, almost any combination of component parts “works” plausibly.

Figure 2.

Comparison of CAD models of Stanesby junior flutes MIMEd6225 and DCM1125. Image by kind permission of Zexuan Qiao.

The final project involved copying an ivory Richard Potter instrument (RCM425), chosen because of the access offered by Gabriele Rossi Rognoni in association with my Visiting Fellowship in Material Culture at the RCM, during which I was asked to assess all the flutes in the collection. This was my choice for a variety of reasons. The flute is a well-made ivory instrument that would have been a top-of-the-range model when it was made by the most prolific and influential London maker of the second half of the 18^th century. It is dated and inscribed, which enabled me to determine part of the instrument's biography and to suggest that the date inscribed on the instrument is considerably later than the date of manufacture. The original plays well but, as the internal surface of the ivory is fissured and porous, sensibly only for short periods, and the fingerhole layout is nicely compact, which makes it comfortable for players with smaller hands. (Richard Potter was one of relatively few 18the century flute makers to consistently offset the fingerholes for each hand diagonally with respect to the bore, for ergonomic reasons, although this particular instrument does not have this feature). A further purpose is methodological. I made all the measurements for this instrument myself, manually. I hope that the instrument will in the near future be CT scanned, and an entirely separate dataset of measurements will result. We have printed our model in a nylon (as with our other flutes) that has a similar density to boxwood, and will investigate printing it in compounds that increase the density nearer to that of ivory. We hope that the RCM will also print the flute from our drawings, but using its own printing regime and materials. We will then have grounds for comparing not only the materials but the “objective” measurements from CT scanning with my manual ones, made with a consideration of manufacturing processes (both 18^th century and 3D print) and an interpretation of likely original condition.

The initial results were not good. Having developed a strong relationship with a commercial printer who understood the tolerances to which we wished to work (home printers are suitable for rough proof of concept printing but simply not in the same league as commercial models for consistency), we were let down by a sub-standard print run. We will have to re-run the first print, incorporating anything we can learn from comparing the failed printed copies with the original flute.

Other more minor projects have proven the viability of scanning and modeling keys, printing molds, and having these cast in silver or brass in China. Keys, particularly for flutes with 6–8 keys, are easily damaged and time-consuming to make by hand. (The cost factor of roughly 1:4 between a 1-keyed and equivalent 6–8-keyed flute is broadly indicative of key cost.) The capacity to produce cheap replacement or substitute keys for damaged or incomplete instruments has been proven by modeling and printing casts for keys for Potter 6–8-keyed instruments, many of which survive with key damage or loss. Modeling also provides a capacity for plausible recreations of incremented models (to accommodate small size variations). Modifying Potter's pewter plug design to replicate keys with square key-flap is conceptually extremely simple in CAD, unlike physical casting or forging. And as described earlier, by modeling the original manufacturing methods (constructing virtual fraise models to adjust the lower portion of the fingerhole undercut), we were able to replicate digitally the characteristic double undercutting of Richard Potter's flutes.

Further detail about the complex geometries of embouchures has been gleaned from an unusual source: a dentist who, himself a keen flute player, enabled us to use a dental probe to help scan and build detailed models of the over and undercut of an embouchure hole. Our experiments with sintered nylon transverse flutes have demonstrated that the precise geometries of embouchure holes and fingerhole undercuts are more difficult to achieve consistently than bore details and outer profiles. Paradoxically, of course, these are the qualities that matter most in the instrument's response. Thus far the edge qualities of 3D-printed nylon simply do not match those of carved hardwoods. With flutes for Irish traditional music it has proven possible to insert cast aluminum embouchure inserts ¹⁹ to compensate for this, with very positive responses from professional players, but as printing densities increase and new composite printing materials emerge it will doubtless become possible to get nearer to the responses of hand-made instruments without such significant intervention. And the most significant objections to 3D printed instruments from the traditional music community we have encountered have concerned the texture of the sintered finish and the physical flexibility of chanters in sets of pipes. I note these details because Science and Technology Studies is often as interested in why certain technologies are not taken up, and do not become consolidated in society, as it is in tracing the genealogies of successful techniques.

A further pragmatic feature of the project as a whole is that it is almost entirely self-funded (with the exception of £1500 from FRIF – the Faculty Research Initiatives Fund at Queen's University Belfast – and the “in kind” co-operation of numerous collections, most notably those of the Royal College of Music and Edinburgh University). A goal has therefore been to ascertain whether such small initiatives can contribute to the ecology of research generally, and if so, what. We have been gratified to receive positive feedback on the extent of our contribution from those involved in much larger and better-funded projects, and to find our work featured in fora alongside such institutionally backed research.

Endnotes

Commercially produced 3D-printed instruments are already in production. ²⁰ Soon they are likely to be ubiquitous. Some of them will bear a passing resemblance to those in museums and in production through other manufacturing methods, but some inevitably will not. What role do musicologists, museum curators, and instrument makers wish to have in influencing this direction of travel? What can we learn from this conceptual shift in tools and making techniques? Acoustic theory tells us that it shouldn’t make a difference what material a wind instrument is made from, but as a player my experience and inherited value systems tell me otherwise. 3D printing gives us the possibility to investigate this issue more accurately and more dispassionately, particularly as we are increasingly able to print in new, hybrid materials that selectively inherit qualities from metals, ceramics, and plastics. ²¹ And we must recognize that comparative tests before general audiences between, for example, wooden and 3D-printed instruments tell us very little. Audiences are not going to invest in instruments. It is expert professional performers who need to be convinced.

The capacity to decouple precise elements of an instrument from others, while reproducing them consistently, combined with algorithmic analysis, opens up the possibility that we can selectively change behaviors and influences of our already modular instruments in unforeseen ways. Qiao's “standard stock” for border bagpipes is already contributing to our knowledge about the relationship between chanters, drones, bores, and reeds.

And of course I’ve already suggested above that, irrespective of the technology involved, the tacit knowledge and assumptions of an individual maker (or within a particular workshop) have a palpable effect on the instrument's performance, despite the fact that they may start with similar measurements. As Wheeldon (2024) notes, we should be wary of making exaggerated claims for a new technology which, just like all the others, produces instruments of varying qualities, the playability of which is enhanced in direct proportion to the amount of expertise and time invested in calibrating and finishing them.

3D printing and modeling can help move us away from a musicology of the specifics of individual physical instruments towards a study of the ideas prevalent in the workshops that made them, and among the musicians who used them. The basis of this is comparative analysis, which enables us to distinguish patterns of activity, to determine working assumptions, and to move towards an understanding of the tacit knowledge embodied in instruments. This may entail on the part of museums and collections a rebalancing from the tangible cultural heritage of objects towards the less tangible cultural heritage inherent in the social processes in which those instruments were entangled: not only making, but selling, owning, altering, and playing.

Positioned in this manner, as part of an ecology of methods making use of the affordances of digital technologies, modeling musical instruments can be seen as contiguous with modeling histories of use and production of those instruments: as part of a musical instrument studies informed by an elevated capacity for fruitful evidence-based speculation.