Welcome
Instrumentarium is an independent research platform dedicated to the study and documentation of musical instruments, with particular attention to traditional instruments of Latin America. The project approaches instruments as knowledge systems and documentary objects — not only sound artifacts, but as material entities that embody histories of making, ecological territories, cultural memory, identities, and epistemologies.
Drawing on perspectives from organology / (ethno)musicology, museology, library and information science, archival studies, and documentary theory, Instrumentarium examines how instruments are understood, built, played, classified, described, recorded, and preserved, and how those processes shape what is remembered about musical traditions.
The site publishes research notes, essays, articles, books, and experimental forms of documentation devoted to the study of musical instruments and sound heritage. The contents of the site can be explored through the navigation menus at the top of the page or through the sections listed in the sidebar.
Blog A Musician's Log | The most recent note
Panpipe and Turtle Shell
| Published May 13, 2026 |
In several Indigenous societies of northern South America, especially within the Guiana Shield region, ethnographic and sonic documentation records a recurring instrumental configuration: a small panpipe performed simultaneously with a turtle-shell idiophone. This note examines such composite systems among groups including the Wayana, Ye'kuana, Wayãpi, and Culina/Madija, exploring how the combined articulation of melodic and percussive sound produces an integrated performance unit shaped by morphological constraints, acoustic ecologies, and regional forms of organological convergence.
Blog A Musician's Log | The most recent sketch
Sounding turtles of Mexico
| Published May 13, 2026 |
Throughout Mexico, turtle shells have formed part of Indigenous musical practices since pre-Hispanic times, appearing in ritual celebrations, ceremonial dances, mythological narratives, and historical chronicles extending from the Maya area to central Mexico and Oaxaca. This sketch surveys the long continuity of these struck idiophones across Mesoamerican traditions, examining their presence in colonial descriptions, codices, and contemporary performances among Nahua, Maya, Huave, Zapotec, Tzeltal, and other Indigenous communities.
Articles
El erquencho y otros clarinetes idioglóticos
| Published April 11, 2025 |
Cuadernos de investigación musical, 17, enero-junio 2023, pp. 150-171.
[From the Spanish abstract] In his 1935 work on musical instruments among the indigenous peoples of South America, Karl Gustav Izikowitz noted the existence of a group of clarinets without fingering holes and idioglottal which he called "the Southern type." Curiously, he did not include in his list one of the few (if not the only) current survivors of that organological family: the erque or erquencho, an aerophone built and played in northwestern Argentina and southern Bolivia. Of relatively simple structure, it produces a hoarse, squeaky and gangly sound, in a limited range of notes, which does not prevent it from being very popular in its area of origin. Unfortunately, outside it is, even today, quite unknown. The article offers a review of the main characteristics of an almost lost family, and of a sound artifact almost invisible and scarcely performed outside its more traditional contexts.
All articles [in Spanish]
Books and other publications
Yanawan yuraqwan
Andean musical instruments in black and white
| Published April 11, 2025 |
Bogotá: Wayrachaki Editora, 2021.
Photo album with 15 black and white images accompanied by brief descriptions, introducing some of the most interesting traditional Andean musical instruments: quenas, pusi p'ias, sikus, toyos, rondadores, ocarinas, charangos, pingullos, pinkillos, waka pinkillos, waylla qhepas and wank'aras.