Digitising Oxford’s Musical Instrument Collections
(The Hill Collection and Bate Collection)
The University of Oxford is home to some of the world’s most significant historical musical instruments, from Renaissance masterworks like the Stradivari violins in the Ashmolean Museum’s Hill Collection to the rare Bassano Basset recorder in the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments. Preserving these fragile material objects while enhancing their accessibility for scholarly research and public engagement presents an ongoing challenge. Dr Vai has been leading the digitisation of the University of Oxford’s musical instrument collections.
Digital technologies, such as 3D scanning and printing, photogrammetry, and augmented and virtual reality, offer new ways of seeing, playing, experiencing, and interacting with the material culture of music history.
Dr Vai’s projects with the Hill Collection and Bate Collection (Ashmolean Museum and Faculty of Music, respectively) are using state-of-the-art photogrammetry to develop high-resolution, interactive digital models of selected instruments. This digitisation process forms a vital part of the preservation of these objects, while also opening up new possibilities for researching and teaching with these renowned Oxford collections.
Digitisation can also render cultural heritage collections more accessible, enabling visitors to hear or better see objects that are often locked inside glass cabinets. Many iconographic features of these instruments, such as crests, coats of arms, inscriptions, and pictorial representations are degraded or difficult to see. High-resolution 3D photogrammetry can help us read these elements and understand how (and where) these instruments were handled and displayed, providing insights into their original appearance, and enabling us 8 9 Background image: Cittern (detail of decoration), c.1570, attributed to Girolamo Virchi (c.1532—after 1574), Italy (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). to trace the origins of their material components so that we can better understand the wider social, cultural, and colonial contexts of these objects.
