Recreating the forms and sounds of historical musical instruments

What if there were a way to create accurate replicas of ancient and historical instruments that could be played and heard?In late 2024, senior MIT postdoc Benjamin Sabatini wrote MIT Professor Eran Egozy to ask just that, and about a collaborative research project between the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE) and the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) to CT scan, chemically and structurally characterize, and produce replicas of the ancient and historical musical instruments housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).