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
Mohoceño
| Published July 15, 2026 |
In the Aymara musical world of Bolivia, the mohoceño is a flute whose imposing length, dense collective sound, and many written names all point back to Mohoza, in the valleys of La Paz. Built in several sizes and played in large ensembles, the instrument transforms bamboo, breath, and coordinated performance into a shared acoustic body. This note examines the mohoceño not only as a duct flute, but as a toponymic archive: an instrument whose name preserves a geographical relation, carrying place, memory, and provenance within its changing form.
Blog A Musician's Log | The most recent sketch
The añáchi of the Ava people
| Published July 15, 2026 |
Among the Ava people of the Bolivian and Argentine lowlands, the añáchi occupies a singular place as a ritual bone whistle closely associated with sorcery. Made from the bone of a stork, chicken, or deer, and reserved for the imbaékwa, a malevolent sorcerer, this sketch examines its material, symbolic meaning, and role within the Ava ceremonial and cosmological world, where sound-producing objects may operate not only as musical instruments, but also as vehicles of power.
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.