The 3 Principal Investigators

Massimiliano Guido

is the Corresponding Principal Investigator of REM@KE and an Associate professor at the Musicology and Cultural Heritage Department of Pavia University in Cremona. He is an organologist and musicologist specialising in historical keyboards and their impact on music theory and performance practice. He holds degrees in musicology, organ, and harpsichords and has studied and worked between Italy, Sweden, and Canada.

Andrea Schiavio​

 is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of York (UK) and Past President of ESCOM—the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. His research on embodied and enactive music cognition has been published in over 60 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and in the co-authored monograph Musical Bodies, Musical Minds (MIT Press, 2022).

Joel Speerstra

is an Associate professor at the University of Göteborg. He is an internationally acclaimed performer, a researcher of historical keyboards, and an instrument builder with thirty years of experience.

The cross-disciplinary nature of these profiles will guarantee a hybrid approach in this program: the person-instrument relationship is too complex for an expert in a single field to easily grasp, especially since so many historical instruments have been changed and rebuilt through the years. In the context of this project, organology will help us look for traces of the builder’s actions within the materials: not only tool markings but also the design choices; musicological research offers various tools to reconstruct the performing composer’s intentions: this process historically resulted in a variety of outcomes, from improvisation to fully written out compositions.

PI Guido will combine organology and musicology to compare the objects of the past with newly built instruments, working with scientists and diagnosticians to document both their materiality and their role in the interplay between abstract ideas and the builder’s design choices; artistic research focuses on the performer’s gestures that are afforded by the specific ideas and design intentions to which every performer must adapt their technique. A technique mirroring the historical musician-instrument dialogue is essential to reimagining the music encoded into a written score. PI Speerstra will explore and document performers engaging with these technique experiments on different dynamic actions to engage with the tacit knowledge in a system that includes original and reconstructed instruments, historical process descriptions of techniques valid for those instruments, and repertoire and improvisation practices that these instruments inspired. Artistic research results are, generally, essays, interviews, live performances, recordings, and new pedagogical forms. Embodied cognition examines how resources from the bodies of builders, players, educators, and listeners determine their musical experiences, fostering new relationships that are formed and transformed in acts of musicking. PI Schiavio and his research team will conduct a series of empirical studies with the primary objective of exploring the intricate experiences that result from the interplay between individuals, their social and cultural environments, and their musical instruments. These studies will utilize interviews as their primary research tool. Before each study, a protocol will be created and validated by a panel of experts to ensure its reliability. Drawing on existing research conducted by Schiavio and colleagues, each qualitative instrument employed in these studies will intentionally maintain a broad scope.

The Research Teams

The 3 PIs will assemble and lead 3 teams composed of 3 Senior Staff (including a Workshop Coordinator), 6 Postdocs, 9 PhD students, and 9 external collaborators (including a Project Manager). Considering the theoretical foundation of Cogntive and Digital Organology and the methodology applied, many doctoral students will be co-advised by the PIs. The three teams will constitute a pool of peers that meets regularly for seminars and conferences, favoring the interdisciplinary dialogue between the group, and also utilizing dedicated social media channels. A Project Manager will monitor the activities and coordinate the research travel, seminars, conferences, and dissemination events.