Preservation and Study of Historical Guitars Museu de la Musica de Catalunya: Methodology Proposal to Play the Unplayable

WoodMusick project is a multi-disciplinary COST action research project. The main goal of the project is to study museum instruments and preserve their physical and acoustical properties. This paper aims to contribute the project by studying historical guitars in Museu de la Musica, Catalunya, as well as to propose a global measurement methodology for prediction of acoustical properties of guitars during the design stage. Two historical classical guitars, Torres 625 from Antonio de Torres and Labrador from the romantic period are studied, in addition to a test guitar. Steady-state and impulse responses are recorded and spectral and physical properties are extracted from recordings. The results are classified with WEKA by ESSENTIA descriptors and two guitars are successfully identified and distinguished from each other. Extracted features and physical properties are observed in the latter stage and sound feature estimations are proposed. Besides the multidisciplinary nature of the study is already a challenging task, the main obstacle turned out to be to build a methodology that ensures the safety of the instrument while collecting the necessary data. The results are promising for building a dataset with a proposed methodology to predict acoustical features of guitars in the design stage as well as creating an archive for historical instruments and monitor their physical state and its effect on sound features in time.