Learning
We maintain open source data sets in order to help everyone get better results from the core activities of Very Early Music:
- Harvesting, seasoning, and processing raw materials.
- Making, parenting, and maintaining reeds – the drivers of the most popular musical instruments for millennia, judging by the archaeological record.
- Making and maintaining instruments based on close observation of the material evidence in museums.
- Composing and revising new music, or fostering the craft of improvisation, pushing boundaries of knowledge in response to evidence of ancient music making.
You don’t need to be a Lotos Lab customer to benefit from this gathering of collective wisdom. At the same time, we want to protect everyone’s privacy, so some data is hidden. The point of Open Science is to accelerate progress by making findings more robust and research more discoverable, allowing others to build on the latest knowledge.
Rather than taking a one-solution-fits-all approach, or guarding our intellectual property like dragons, we believe in giving others control. Lotos Lab’s policy is to make it easier for you to push boundaries and make adaptations. We learn by being curious, by doing things differently, by making mistakes, by not being stuck in what we do or believe, and by exchanging results fully and openly so that others can test and refine our findings.
We warmly welcome your input, raising the value of these four data stores and getting the balance of sharing and data protection right. “As open as possible, as closed as necessary”. Our position on Open Science ethics aligns with Lindemann and Häberlein 2023. This is a complex arena, however, and we are newbies — please send your feedback to mese@lotos.lab.
If your own work benefits from our openness, please give credit to the creators in any form that makes it easy for people to trace the source. Keeping the pathways of knowledge creation clear gives us health as a greater body of interdependent laboratories, uplifting everyone’s spirits and quality of work! Please also consider making a donation to support our little lab:
- promoting the reproducibility of results,
- increasing the diffusion of knowledge, and
- accelerating scientific progress and innovation.
Lotos Lab’s data logging service is the public participation aspect of ongoing research that we first shared in Journal of Music Archaeology 2. Our aim is to make it easy for our colleagues and customers to collaborate in multi-lifetime learning, making doublepipe research more scientific, efficient, durable, and inclusive. The goal is a source of collective wisdom that honours a host of researchers, all with different ideas, driving higher musical satisfaction for all. It addresses the biggest problem aulos learners face: unlike aulos learners in ancient times, we don’t have generations of accumulated expertise to draw on.
Since 11 February 2025, Lotos Lab colleagues and customers can log what happens throughout the lifespan of any reed or instrument. This is about sharing not only what works, but, equally importantly, the mistakes to avoid. A sheet music series is in preparation, building on experiments like these:
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6885089.v1
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7770731.v4
To enable a systematic logging of observations, interventions, and results, we assign unique IDs to every harvest, and laser-engrave unique IDs on every Lotos Lab reed and instrument. Please use the simple forms embedded in the catalogs below to advise us of mistakes, omissions, updates, or additions. We welcome new collaborators and thank everyone who is participating in this multi-lifetime research. The musical scores will likewise be living digital objects, growing and adapting in response to different environments and new discoveries. Every voice counts!