On Organology: Taxonomy and Transdisciplinarity

Organology, the study of musical instruments, is a field whose advances tend to draw on and synthesise knowledge from multiple disciplines. This is because it traverses and often conflates artistic and scientific enquiry in order to chronicle, understand, and pose musicological questions about the physical, visual, aural, and/or cultural contexts of musical objects. Organology, then, defines musical instruments as tangible or intangible entities in order to acknowledge and examine their relationships with other things and beings. The tendency of organologists nowadays, striving to unify understanding of their field, means that a transdisciplinary imperative fuels many of organology's latest advances—although this fact also impedes wider recognition of the field and, arguably, its impact.