Alistair Fraser is on the search for the instruments themselves held in museums and private collections. I imagine there are preliminary findings about the instruments? Can you give a brief outline about the sort of instruments they are? Parallels (or differences) with other Polynesian instruments? Māori instruments vs Moriori?
Actually, there’s been a few people doing this part of the mahi for this project. Al’s done some in the past, and is about to do some more. Irene Hundleby, Maramena Tuna, Hata Temo and myself have also been involved.
- A brief outline: several different kinds of flutes, bird callers, trumpets, percussion instruments, and instruments that are swung or that create sound through tension on a string. There’s quite a variety!
- There’s some interesting parallels with instruments from other parts of Oceania, but also some really curious differences. One taonga pūoro, the pūtōrino, is utterly unique to Māori. The addition of a wooden mouthpiece to the conch trumpets (pūtātara) is uncommon elsewhere (used in Tahiti and the Marquesas). An interesting absence in Aotearoa are the slit log gongs and skin- headed drums found elsewhere in Polynesia; Māori percussion instruments were quite different in design.
The only musical instrument that shows up in the archaeological record for Moriori are albatross bone flutes (two of these are housed in museum collections, and one has recently turned up in an archaeological dig on Rēkohu). There are written accounts, though of other types of instruments too – mainly percussion ones: including the striking of trees in order to change the wind direction or cause rain.
The study is also ground-breaking in that you will CT Scan the instruments! Can you expand a little on this process and what you think you will learn from this? How will these images be used? Is it like a hospital CT scan…or a different technology?
We actually used the CT scanner at the Dunedin hospital – so, it’s exactly like a hospital CT scan. With the CT scanning, imagine each instrument being chopped up into 0.6mm horizontal slices, with each slice being an x-ray image of the cross-section of the instrument. Local designer Michael Findlay used a medical viewing application called Horos to create virtual 3D models from the CT scan data. Because Horos wasn’t compatible with the 3D printing software, another application called Meshlab had to be used to prepare the virtual models for printing, and the instruments were successfully printed using a plastic medium.
There were some pretty cool aspects of this. One of the most important things was that the prints were playable. Most instruments in museums can’t be played – either because playing them would damage them, or because they’re treated with chemicals that would harm players. So the prints were a way to let the taonga sing once more. More study of their sounds could help us learn more about how past Māori music sounded. We were also able to create pull-apart versions, which is a way to learn more about the internal structure of the instruments. This is important knowledge for makers of these instruments, as the internal construction is not always easy to learn about just from looking at the outside of an instrument, and is super- important in determining the sounds the instrument is capable of. Another possibility that we explored was digitally ‘repairing’ broken instruments, and then printing the repaired versions. Another interesting thing was that we could actually see the wood grain of the instruments; micro-CT scanning would likely show that info in even greater detail. Eventually, that kind of info could be used to help identify the types of trees used to make the instruments, and possibly also to date the age of the trees they were made from.