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
Cueca
| Published August 19, 2026 |
In Chile, the cueca encompasses a wide range of regional musical and dance traditions, from rural singing practices to urban cueca brava and northern instrumental forms. This note explores its shared musical structure, instrumental and vocal diversity, the role of recordings and folkloric institutions in shaping its national image, and the political and cultural tensions surrounding its designation as Chile's national dance in 1979.
Blog A Musician's Log | The most recent sketch
The whistles of the Ava people
| Published July 29, 2026 |
Among the Ava people of the Bolivian and Argentine lowlands, the serére was a long wooden whistle that produced two notes, while the yvýra mímby was a circular, flat, and richly decorated whistle. This sketch examines their construction and ornamentation, as well as their uses in celebrations and warfare.
Articles
When Music Leaves No Objects: Yámana Vocal Practice and the Archival Bias Toward Instruments
| Published November 11, 2026 |
Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, 7 (3), 2026, pp. 270-285.
This article examines how archives, museums, and organological classification systems privilege material instruments when documenting musical traditions. Through the predominantly vocal musical practices of the Yámana people of Tierra del Fuego, it explores forms of musical evidence that resist object-based collecting and develops an approach to archival absence as a methodological problem.
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.