Play Your Heart Out: The Virtual Instrument Museum

A good percentage of us probably played an instrument, either willingly or under duress, as a child.  Some of you might still play in a band or as a hobby, or you might consider yourself a music connoisseur.  But do you have any idea how an idiophone works?  Or what a sarangi is and where it originated?  Neither did I, until a few minutes ago, when I visited the Virtual Instrument Museum.

The Virtual Instrument Museum is a digital archive of Wesleyan University's World Music Collection, and it's admirably thorough.  You can search for instruments by their different compositions (chordophone, aerophone, membranophone, and the above-mentoined idiophone), materials, region they come from, or alphabetically.  Besides defining all these musical terms, any of these search options brings up lists of instruments in each sub-category.  Instruments have their own pages of information, most of which include photos.  Some instruments have accompanying audio and video clips, and a select few include 3D images that you can rotate.  There's also an interactive map that allows you to view all the countries that have instruments in the archive.

That's about it - there's really no exhibits, and besides adding new instruments every so often, nothing seems to change.  But that's fine.  This is the type of collection that really benefits from an online presence, because it's rare and exciting.  How many people would trek up to Wesleyan to see musical instruments?  Not many (I'm not even sure where Wesleyan is).  But having images, information and sound files easily available can draw people in who might otherwise never see a collection of worldwide musical instruments.

I only hope that Wesleyan can create more 3D images and post them online.  They're really cool, and they're the next best thing to seeing the instruments in person.


Virtual Instrument Musuem
Website:  www.wesleyan.edu/vim/