Photo - Bayerischer Rundfunk 2025

Josef Focht heads the DIGITAL ORGANOLOGY research centre at the Musikinstrumentenmuseum der Universität Leipzig. He currently holds the only professorship for organology at a German-speaking university. His research covers the entire period from the early modern era to the 20th century. He is particularly interested in all conceivable stringed instruments, regardless of whether they are played with a bow, plucked with the fingers or stimulated by means of a keyboard.

His activities extend far beyond university teaching: in particular, he is involved in exhibitions and museums, consulting for public administrations, the media and science promotion, as well as collection and provenance research. In order to examine all these areas in detail, he has been working with his project teams, networks and doctoral students for 25 years to build a virtual research environment that has brought together one of the most comprehensive repositories of research data in our field, spanning multiple collections and offering a global perspective. Over the past decade, he and his team of musicologists, art technologists and computer scientists have developed a comprehensive range of virtual tools and formal standards that are essential for handling digital research data.