At Orpheus Instituut, we ask ourselves...
Is music a technology?
Music is inseparable from technology: instruments, media and digital systems shape how it is imagined, created and experienced. From far- and near-historical tools to AI and virtual environments, music operates as a continuum of technical practices and cultural abstractions across cultures and eras globally.
Here we address this type of question:
What happens to music, creativity, and artistic practices when we decenter the human?
Digital tools such as AI, blockchain and web platforms reshape how musical knowledge is created, analysed and shared. They transform authorship, research methods and dissemination, enabling new conceptual frameworks, collaborative practices and experimental outputs across digital cultures.
Here we address this type of question:
Is music-making shaped by instruments?
Music-making is shaped by instruments, technologies, bodies and social environments. Historical tools, rebuilt instruments and performer-object interactions reveal how sound, technique and creativity emerge from material conditions, embedding music in cultural, technological and human networks.
Here we address this type of question:
How does musical creativity engage with the past?
Contemporary music making engages with the past through archives, collections and digital tools that reactivate historical knowledge. By reinterpreting sources across disciplines and media, creativity becomes a dynamic dialogue between present-day cultural contexts and early as much as recent traditions and experimentation.
Here we address this type of question:
Are inherited roles as composers and performers still valid?
Modern musical practices reveal creativity as collaborative, with performers, technologies and researchers shaping works alongside composers. Historical as well as experimental practices challenge fixed authorship, highlighting shared agency in developing repertoire, techniques and new musical aesthetics.
Here we address this type of question:
What am I touching when I play an instrument?
Musical touch involves physical contact with the instrument, sensory feedback, embodied knowledge and emotional imagination. It shapes performer identity and creative agency, while audiences may vicariously experience this touch, blurring boundaries between action, perception and sound.
Here we address this type of question:
What can musical fragmentation tell us about identity and social connection?
Fragmentation reflects contemporary musical experience as fluid, iterative and curated. By privileging processes over fixed works, fragments reveal how identity and meaning are shaped through reconfiguration, openness and social practices of listening, creation and interpretation.
Here we address this type of question:
How can sound facilitate community building across disciplinary boundaries?
Sound fosters community by creating a shared space for exchange across disciplines. Through dialogue, collaboration and experimentation, it connects diverse practices, enabling participants to develop new discourses and critical approaches together.
Here we address this type of question:
At Orpheus Instituut, research begins with music itself. We are a centre for artistic research in music: a field in which practising musicians are the researchers, and in which playing, composing, listening and experimenting are not illustrations of knowledge but ways of producing it.
Our central conviction is that some forms of understanding can be reached only through deep engagement with artistic material and practice. Artistic research takes its place alongside other forms of inquiry as a full and rigorous contribution to human knowledge.
As an independent institution, we are free to be driven by curiosity — to take intellectual risks, to work across disciplinary boundaries, and to respond to emerging questions with agility. Our researchers explore how music and a changing society shape one another, how technology and musical practice transform each other, and how the musical past and the musical future continually remake one another. They investigate what it means to think through sound.
The result is a laboratory where ideas and artistic practice are inseparable: a place where musicians experiment from within their own art, pursuing not established conventions but the next practices to come.
Discover our themes
Theme: Music and societal change
Cultural and digital shifts are reshaping music and its communities. Researchers at Orpheus Instituut explore these changes creatively, developing flexible skills to help musicians adapt and actively contribute to society’s future.
Theme: Music and technological development
Music is both physical and abstract, shaped by instruments, sound and ideas. At Orpheus Instituut, artist researchers develop and experiment with AI, digital tools and virtual environments to create new forms of music-making.
Theme: The musical past in the musical future
Contemporary creativity connects inherited traditions with new meanings. Researchers reimagine historical materials, experimenting with their role in modern practices and building creative links between past and future.
Theme: Knowledge through music
Artistic research reveals forms of knowledge rooted in practice and material engagement. Orpheus Instituut pioneers new ways of thinking and communicating through music, supported by advanced technologies.
Researchers
Orpheus Instituut addresses the most challenging questions in music. Our artist-researchers work across disciplinary boundaries to explore and articulate new modes of knowledge and practice.
Dive into our research clusters
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Research shouldn't happen in isolation. Discover ways to interact with other researchers here at Orpheus Instituut.