Speculative Organology

Hochschule der Künste Bern

Doctoral Research

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This research proposes a transdisciplinary framework where instrumental and compositional imagination form an integrative whole. Modern organology conceptualizes musical instruments as dynamic networks of subjects, technical objects, and musical environments. Beyond traditional acoustical artifacts, instruments unfold in micro-scales, fictional functions, and virtual hyper-dimensions, integrating compositional strategies into their ontological foundations.

In an era dominated by technical objects, musical instruments emerge when embedded in specific practices. This invites a critical inversion: what forms of musical experience give rise to and sustain the sociocultural complex of technical objects? Organology has largely functioned as an instrument taxonomy; however, can its relational models speculate and design future instruments?

From its scientific origins, organology focused on sound production, later incorporating ethnographic perspectives. By the 21st century, it established that instruments must be understood within cultural contexts. This triad—objects, subjects, and context—enables the fusion of composition, representation, hybridization, and instrument fabrication.

Objects, once limited to material dimensions, now extend to microscale interactions and fictionalized functions, while subjects decentralize to include automatons, avatars, and AI agents. This compels a reevaluation of who or what performs and listens within a musical system.

Using methodologies from systematic musicology, acoustic modeling, instrumentality studies, and parametric design, this research proposes a Speculative Organizational Model (SOM). Rather than classifying existing instruments, SOM reveals gaps where undiscovered instruments may emerge, emphasizing the body as interface, multidimensional transduction, environmental reciprocity, and teleology. It posits that wherever there is the potential for instrumentation, a musical instrument can emerge.

The field of organology has traditionally focused on…

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Diagram of the transformer deep learning architecture.

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Use the two columns component to display two columns of content. In this example, the first column contains a figure with a YouTube video and the second column contains a figure with a custom React component. By default, they display side by side, but if the screen is narrow enough (for example, on mobile), they’re arranged vertically.

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Model	Accuracy	F1 score	Training time (hours)
BERT-base	0.89	0.87	4.5
RoBERTa-large	0.92	0.91	7.2
DistilBERT	0.86	0.84	2.1
XLNet	0.90	0.89	6.8

BibTeX citation

    @misc{roman2024academic,
  author = "{Roman Hauksson}",
  title = "Academic Project Page Template",
  year = "2024",
  howpublished = "\url{https://research-template.roman.technology}",
}

Agential Ontologies

Explore the relationships between different theoretical frameworks in this interactive 3D visualization:

This visualization maps the relationships between various theoretical frameworks along three axes:

Agency: The degree of agency attributed to non-human actors
Materiality: The emphasis on material aspects and physical relationships
Environment: The consideration of environmental and ecological factors