University Museums in Scotland - Conference 2011
UNIVERSITIES AND MUSEUMS: NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?
Drawing to scale: a museum project in the university environment Eleanor Smith, St Cecilia's Hall, University of Edinburgh
[PP1] Good morning: my name is Eleanor Smith and I am going to talk to you today about the Drawing to Scale project, and how it is beneficial to both researchers and museum staff alike.
[PP2] Drawing to Scale is a research project based at the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments (EUCHMI for short), and funded by the Museums Galleries Scotland Recognition fund. This fund, as many of our Scottish colleagues will know, is available to museums whose practices have been shown to reach certain high standards. The specific aim of this Fund is to encourage these museums to invest in projects that will both raise awareness of their collections, and to develop and expand the impact these collections and the work they are doing have on the wider public.
EUCHMI was one of the first Museums to gain Recognition Status from MGS, and this acknowledgment has benefited us greatly as a collection, not least as it has opened up funding opportunities and allowed us to undertake a number of new projects over the last few years.
[PP3] Like many such museums and collections, EUCHMI has a number of roles and responsibilities within the University: to preserve and conserve historical objects, to display these objects for public access, and as a research and teaching collection used by staff and students. Being a musical instrument collection that is housed in concert halls (one of these historic in its own right) brings the additional issue of using the collection as a performing collection without compromising the integrity of the objects.
As a centre of Organological Research (that is the academic study of the history and development of musical instruments) Edinburgh University is world leading and attracts students from many different countries to its Masters and PhD programmes. Many of these students (including myself) are involved in the running of the museum, whether on research projects or in curatorial capacities, so there is a great deal of exchange of knowledge and skills between staff and students.
The museum buildings are also used for teaching undergraduates, and for concerts organised by the University Music Department and trusted outside groups, occasionally using historical instruments from the collections where appropriate and therefore the upkeep of those instrument which are suitable for playing/and in usable condition is part of the day to day life of the museum in a way it might not be if the instruments were elsewhere.
[PP4] Drawing to Scale is of course one of these new projects, the aim of which is to produce plan drawings of all the historical keyboard instruments in the University of Edinburgh's collection quickly and relatively easily using a pantograph directly connected to a computer aided design programme - in this case AutoCAD. An extension of the project would be to use the pantograph equipment to record details of other musical instruments. These drawings will be a record of the instruments in their current state, detailing the layout and important features, but also showing where visible, the evidence of how the instruments have been altered over the years.
[PP5] The construction of the Edinburgh pantograph was based on a design developed by John Watson, conservator of musical instruments at Colonial Williamsburg, and himself a keyboard specialist. In this case, the pointer is a laser pen, with its beam filtered and focused through exposed photographic film to reduce the beam to a practicable size - in our setup, the laser beam is about half a millimetre in diameter. To the central part of the pantograph is fixed a puck, which is a location mouse that transfers the dimensions to the computer via the digital drawing pad.
[PP6] The construction of the pantograph for the Edinburgh project was a learning process in itself, despite having the plans of the original, as there were various constructional aspects that had to be re-thought for our specific needs. Theoretically, any reduction (or indeed enlargement) could be achieved using this apparatus by changing the ratios of the arm lengths, but the Edinburgh pantograph is set up to reduce the measurements by half when the data is logged into the computer. It is then be a simple job to enlarge the drawings if necessary, although it is as easy to double any measurements taken off the drawing, which has the advantage that any mistakes are more easily spotted during the drawing process.
The arms of the pantograph themselves are made out of aluminium metre rulers, partly for the convenience of easily ensuring the ratio of the arms was correct, but also due to their material properties: we needed something that would be light and strong and inflexible in the horizontal plane so that the arms would not bend and cause the drawing to be distorted. The middle arms had to be made from plastic, as the metal interfered with the working of the puck, but these take less strain than the outer arms and therefore the plastic substitute was deemed acceptable.
The usable area underneath the pantograph glass is about the size of A2 paper, and therefore only two or three of the collections instruments can be drawn in a single position. The frame was measured as such that it will take the width of the widest harpsichord in the collection (although the legs can be removed to fit wider instruments such as pianos), and the depth of the frame was also designed with this in mind - making it rather larger than John Watson's original. As the aim of the Drawing to Scale project is to produce plan view drawings of ALL the keyboard instruments, and as the remit of the collection is so broad, these factors had to be taken into account.
[PP7] All the pivot points on the arms of the pantograph need to retain a certain degree of stiffness for effective measuring, and be tight enough that there is no movement at the joints (which might affect the data collection). However, there still needed to be enough pivotal movement for the arms to actually work. Therefore, we designed simple rod and cap pivots to our specific requirements, which were then printed by the University's architecture workshop using their 3D printer which is more commonly used for printing parts of architectural models.
This is of course one the advantages of running such a project in a University environment as there were so many resources available to us outwith our own small department. At the same time as producing the pivots for the joints, we designed and 'printed' a simple attachment to link the puck to the arms of the pantograph using a disc that fits tightly into its crosshairs. This attachment can be removed easily when recalibrating the system (a process that needs to be undertaken each time a new drawing is started or the CAD programme is restarted).
[PP8] The drawing process using the pantograph equipment is relatively simple once one gets acquainted with CAD software: it is a case of positioning the laser pointer at the edge of part of the instrument, or in the central point of a pin, and then clicking the mouse-buttons on the puck.
[PP9] Each element is given a separate layer within the drawing, and these are colour coded for ease of recognition: case elements are pink, keyboards are pale blue, and pins are dark blue. These are arbitrary colours, chosen merely because they are easy to see against the grey background of the CAD programme when drawing. It is very easy to re-colour all the elements for the purpose of printing.
In the majority of cases, the instruments in the collection are far too large to be measured in a single position: in which case a series of smaller drawings are made, taking care to overlap the drawings so that they may be mapped onto each other at a later stage. This drawing is an example of a clavichord that was plotted in two separate positions, with the line [CLICK FOR LINE] marking the approximate point where the two drawings overlap.
[PP10] As you can see from these details of the drawing, the overlap is not perfect: although the soundboard profiles have lined up neatly, there is a certain amount of discrepancy at the right cheek of the instrument. Part of the reason for such inaccuracies is that the pantograph still relies on the human eye, and one of the few disadvantages of using a laser pointer in this apparatus is that it is harder to see the beam clearly on chamfered edges of instruments as it is scattered by the angled surface. Having said this, the difference between the positions of the two cheek drawings and at the widest point of difference at the soundboard edge is only around 1mm, which is actually very little (and a perfectly acceptable error margin in a publishable drawing).
[PP11] When the pantograph was first completed in May we focused our efforts on smaller instruments - largely because we need to clear space in the museum galleries, and therefore any instrument we worked on needed to be small enough that it can be easily removed from the rig (which was positioned in the Museum foyer) at the end of each working day. The pantograph was tested using this octave spinet, which has most of the constructional elements one would expect on a harpsichord. This made it ideal for assessing what level of detail the instruments needed to be drawn in, and what level of overlap and therefore the number of positioning marks were necessary each time the instrument was moved in and out.
As you can see from this picture, this instrument also alerted us to the necessity of lifting smaller instruments up on blocks bringing them closer to the glass and the laser pointer, as the closer the instrument is, the more accurate the laser beam, and therefore the more accurate the drawing.
The next step was to measure an instrument with a different action, which given the desire for small instruments meant working on clavichords. Various elements were discussed in relation to the detail needed for the average researcher, based on the experience of measuring the spinet.
If we return to the drawing of the clavichord I used as an example earlier [PP12], you may have noticed that the most obvious omission is that only part of the keyboard has been drawn. What has been included are the top and bottom notes of the keyboard necessary for noting the full keyboard span, and the middle octave encompassing middle c giving the octave span, and the relative size of the different notes in the octave which can often differ on old instruments.
What has been included is the detail of the position of every keylever, an essential feature in clavichords, as researchers want to know the layout of the backs of the keylevers, and the position that the tangents enter them (an indication of tuning systems. This is particularly important in an fretted instrument like this example.
A drawing as detailed as this has over one thousand points of measurement, which if drawn the conventional way would be tripled or quadrupled given the necessity of triangulating each one from an element such as a case corner. This is a job of weeks if not longer. Using the pantograph, this instrument was drawn in a working day. This is despite the necessity of taking breaks from both the computer and the laser for the sake of one's eyes, and the usual interruptions encountered in a working museum. A single strung instrument like an Italian virginal takes about the same amount of time.
[PP13] Once the pantograph equipment had been moved to its more permanent home in one of the museum galleries, we were able to start working on some of the larger instruments in the collection, such as this single manual harpsichord by Andreas Ruckers the Elder. An harpsichord like this one with three sets of strings, and therefore 3 sets of pins and jacks to draw and evidence of previous historic states takes relatively longer to record. This can be anything from 2 to 4 days worth of work depending on how much evidence of previous incarnations is still in existence. But even this represents a huge saving in man-hours over conventional methods.
[PP14] Another advantage of the pantograph drawing for the researcher, but particularly the museum/conservator can be shown by comparison with this detail of a published drawing by the curator of the collection, Dr Darryl Martin (intended for use by instrument builders).
The most obvious difference between the two drawings is that the case sides of the latter are normalised - that is they are straightened to produce an 'ideal' drawing of the instrument that can be copied. The pantograph drawing shows the instrument (if I may be permitted a cliché) 'warts and all'. This shows any movement in the instrument either due to conditions it has been kept in, or indeed poor workmanship or issues with the original design. It also allows the individual researcher to make their own judgement on the original dimensions and construction of the instrument, rather than being dictated to by the draughtsman's bias - however well informed they may be.
[PP15] It is also possible to use the pantograph to record greater levels of detail of an instrument, particularly of decoration or scribe lines, that would be impracticable on a published drawing (such as those seen around the hitchpins on this detail from the clavichord) - whereas in a digitally stored one, the layers can simply be hidden to clarify the data. This may seem superficial details, but have the potential to become important elements of the instruments history when viewed by the right researcher.
From a collections care perspective, we have also been recording any cracks in instrument soundboards, any damage to the cases of the keyboard instruments drawn, and any other relevant information that may be of use to us when conducting future condition surveys of the instruments. The fact that this is stored digitally means that our records can perhaps be more easily accessed by members of museum staff across the university campus in a way that is simply not yet possible with the existing paper records.
[PP16] One might of course ask the question: why are these digital drawings of musical instruments important to organologists? Or, by extension: how is this project useful EUCHMI from a collections care perspective?
Historically, musical commentators have littered their books with useful (and less useful drawings of instruments). One of the finest examples is L'Art du Facteur des Orgues by Dom Bedos de Celles published between 1766 and 1778, to which is appended a fine collection of technical drawings of instruments that he describes in the text. The detail and (assumed) accuracy of these drawings is both useful for researchers such as myself, but also can be used by modern instrument builders to make historical copies.
A good drawing is the next best thing to physically studying a musical instrument, and indeed in some aspects more useful if the information is presented in a clear manner. Of course, builders of historical copies use technical drawings to copy instruments, but they can also essential to the researcher. Sometimes this is due to the accessibility of drawings in relation to physical instruments - it is not always possibly to access original instruments in the course of a research project due to distance, budget, or because the instrument is in a restricted access location such as a private collection or a public museum on open display. In cases like these a drawing can be a very acceptable substitute, indeed allowing the researcher far more time to study the instrument in question than could be possible even with the best circumstances. To this end (and given the opportunity), many musical instrument researchers produce their own simple drawings, based on measurements of the instrument and photographs. It can be an arduous task even to produce the simplest of plan drawings, particularly in the case of keyboard instruments.
Of course from the museum's perspective it is advantageous to be able to send drawings to researchers, as it means that the necessary measurements can be gleaned from the drawing without each researcher being required to make their own measurements. This means that physical contact with the instruments is reduced whether those that are also played in concert, or those of too much historical interest to be part of the playing collection, preserving them for future generations and generally reducing wear-and-tear.
The creation of a digital archive will also increase the impact of the collection outwith Edinburgh: we have recently completed another project which draws together digital archive materials of musical instrument collections across Europe - Musical Instrument Museums Online or MIMO project now in the process of being integrated into Europeana. The availability of drawings as part of the Museum's own digital archive can only serve to enrich the information available on the collections and open them out to a wider audience.
[PP17] In summary, The Drawing to Scale project aims to revolutionise access to the University's music collections by producing a digital archive of plan drawings of historical keyboard instruments that can be referred to by both museum staff, and by external researchers, to a level unprecedented in the museum's history. Despite the small degree of human error discussed above, the accuracy of drawings is increased, and the detail that is displayable in the various layers available in CAD programmes is much greater than on a printed drawing.
This can only serve to allow organologists access to more and more detail on the construction of these musical instruments, whilst allowing the Collection to enrich its own archival records whilst also reducing wear on the instruments from constant re-examination by different researchers and creating a new way of monitoring the condition of the instruments.
