Virtual analogue instruments: an approach to active preservation of the studio di fonologia musicale

Electroacoustic music is a young form of art. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to take care of its preservation, due to the limited life of the recording supports, of the reading systems of the data, and of the instruments. Moreover, preservation and restoration of electroacoustic music works raise peculiar technical and philological issues. With particular regard to electrophone instruments, many technological generations have passed since the appearance of the first instruments, and many electronic components used in their construction do not exist anymore or are only available with difficulty. Electrophones are considered to be the only musical instruments which produce sound primarily by electrical means. Electrophones are one of the five main categories in the Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification.156 Although this category is not included in the original scheme published in 1914, it was added by Sachs in 1940,157 to describe instruments involving electricity. Preservation of supports, reading devices, and instruments of electroacoustic music requires specific knowledge, adequate funding within institutional frameworks, and interdisciplinary collaboration among several experts in the field, because damage produced by unsuitable preservation or inadequate restoration is irreversible. Production by composers is considerable: already in 1967 Hugh Davies had catalogued world-wide around 5000 electroacoustic music works,158 and this number is today much larger. Alarm bells are already ringing, and recent years have seen increasing attention to these issues, and a growing awareness of how precarious the passive preservation of this cultural heritage of the recent past can be. The EU is particularly sensitive to these issues: an example of this awareness is the EU-funded DREAM project,159 whose results are discussed in this essay. This project defines an approach to an active preservation of the electrophone instruments of the SdF, and is one of the first attempts to address this issue from a multidisciplinary perspective involving engineering, interaction design, and musicological competences. The final goal is to develop an installation consisting of a software-hardware system that re-creates the electronic lutherie of the SdF, allowing users (both musicians and amateurs) to interact with such lutherie. Achieving this goal implies: i. analysing the devices through project schemes and direct inspection; ii. validating the analysis through simulations with ad hoc tools; iii. developing physical models of the analogue devices, which allow efficient and accurate numerical simulations of their functioning; iv. designing appropriate interfaces to interact with the virtual devices. In order to illustrate this process, some specific electrophone instruments of the SdF, the early sinusoidal oscillators and the so-called amplitude selector, will be considered in this essay as relevant case studies, both from a technical and from a historical and musicological viewpoints.