Luciano Azzigotti: Speculative Organology

Field of study: Artistic Research
Tilknytning: MishMash - Centre for AI and Creativity

Organology has traditionally described the instruments that exist. This project asks what instruments could exist, and what their invention reveals about musical systems, technical objects and their interaction.

Composing music can also mean composing instruments. Rather than treating the instrument as given in advance, the project approaches its materials, acoustic principles, interfaces, behaviours and relations with performers and environments as compositional material. An instrument is therefore not a finished object but a process through which musical possibilities are constructed and transformed.

The project develops Speculative Organology as a framework for this expanded field of composition. Instruments are considered through five interconnected dimensions — material, object, agent, interaction and environment — so that physical, digital and fictional instruments can be investigated within one model.

The research proceeds through artistic practice. Instruments are imagined, designed, simulated, built, measured, played and revised in rehearsal. Some begin as physical questions, others as fictional propositions or impossible constraints. In both cases speculation becomes a method for producing concrete musical situations, objects and works.

Approaches

The research moves between three layers.

The acoustic layer investigates instruments as physical systems, where materials, geometries, excitation, resonance and coupling can be modelled, measured and transformed.

The ontological layer examines how an instrument emerges through relations between performers, technical objects, algorithms and environments. From this perspective, composing an instrument also means composing the conditions under which musical actions can occur.

The fictional layer introduces instruments and constraints that may be physically impossible. Rather than functioning only as representations, these fictional objects operate as design hypotheses: they expose assumptions about what an instrument is, and open new material, technical and musical possibilities.

Methods include acoustic modelling, digital fabrication, materials research, parametric and speculative design, machine learning, instrument making, rehearsal and performance. Artificial intelligence is investigated as part of embodied and adaptive systems — for designing, sensing, listening and acting — rather than as a system for generating musical content from prompts.

Artistic outcomes take different forms: experimental instruments, compositions, performances, installations, software and fictional objects. Across all of them the question remains the same: what happens when the design of the instrument becomes an act of composition?

Collaboration

The project connects composition and artistic research with acoustics, materials science, digital fabrication, interaction design, architecture, instrument making and performance. Collaborations involving experimental instruments, measurement, fabrication, workshops and performances form part of its research process.