This event is free and open to the public, with no registration required.

Abstract

This talk presents a retrospective on NEMUS (Numerical Restoration of Historical Musical Instruments, https://nemusproject.eu/), a five-year ERC-funded project at the University of Bologna dedicated to reviving the sound of historical keyboard instruments that are currently out of playing condition. NEMUS grew out of a problem faced by museum collections: many of their most significant instruments cannot be played without compromising their material integrity, and traditional restoration, where it is possible at all, often means erasing the very evidence that makes an instrument historically valuable. The project proposes numerical restoration as an alternative — a way of returning these instruments to sound and to the hands of performers without touching the originals. This has meant working closely with curators, conservators, and makers, and rethinking what a “copy" of a historical instrument can be when the digital and the physical are designed together.

The talk outlines the project's main research threads, with some attention to the synthesis machinery underneath. This includes energy-stable finite-difference time-domain schemes for stiff, geometrically nonlinear strings; modal formulations that recover real-time performance where full FDTD is out of reach; and strategies for coupling string models to soundboard and radiation components. On the interface side, these synthesis engines are paired with mechanically faithful playing surfaces — including the optically sensed digital replica of the 1547 Trasuntino harpsichord, now installed at the Tagliavini Collection in Bologna, where continuous jack-motion capture and an unaltered historical action close the loop between performer and simulation, and where haptic authenticity turns out to matter as much as the sound itself. Reflections on open-science practices and reproducible workflows in digital lutherie run through the talk.

The talk closes with a forward-looking perspective on what numerical restoration can offer the musical acoustics community and the institutions that hold these instruments, as well as the open challenges that lie ahead.

Michele Ducceschi

Michele Ducceschi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Bologna and has been the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project NEMUS. His research spans physical modelling, sound synthesis, nonlinear vibration, musical acoustics, and room acoustics, with a strong emphasis on open and reproducible science. Prior to Bologna, he held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and a Royal Society Newton Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.