By: Nicholas Surges
Carleton University
“Mystery Music”: Digital Strategies for Collections Research
5 m
Apr 29, 2024
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Nicholas Surges
Canadian museums enjoy a strong reputation as authoritative and trustworthy sources of information. To ensure their artifact databases contain the most accurate and up-to-date records, museum curators conduct periodic collections assessments. Sometimes artifacts haven’t been closely examined in many years – in some cases, many decades – making them prime candidates for review. While documenting instruments in Ingenium’s musical instrument collection as part of my practicum placement this year, I was tasked with seeking out more information on artifacts that were incompletely catalogued or, in some cases, even misidentified in the database.
How could this be? Possibly, it’s a consequence of when these items were acquired.
Almost 70 percent of Ingenium’s musical instrument collection was acquired before the early 1990s, meaning that curators at the time did not yet have access to the internet or to other digital resources when assessing incoming donations.
Without access to the wealth of historical information and research tools now readily available on the web, they may not have had adequate sources on-hand to positively identify or fully describe an artifact at its time of acquisition. Resulting omissions or mistakes could persist for years in the artifact catalogue records before being discovered and remedied by future curators.
Unlike when many of these artifacts were acquired, curators and research associates now have a plethora of new digital tools that can be helpful when revisiting artifact records and filling in knowledge gaps. One of these is Google Patents, which draws from more than 100 patent offices around the world (and indexes full text from 17 of these).
One mystery object that I was able to identify using patent searches was Ingenium’s Whitlock Automatic Harp. It had originally been categorized as a mechanical piano. This made a certain amount of sense: the acquisition report noted that, like a player piano, it was played using perforated paper rolls; and, on a first inspection, the soundboard appeared similar to that of an upright piano, with strings running across it vertically.
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Nicholas Surges
The Whitlock Automatic Harp: a coin-operated, mechanically-operated musical instrument from the early 1900s. It had initially been categorized in the artifact database as a player piano.
Most pianos have manufacturer's markings, either on the outside of their casing or internally on the soundboard, but this instrument didn’t. The only clue I had was a small plaque on the outside with two patent dates: September 18, 1899 and November 1, 1904. While patent dates can be useful leads for further research, one of the challenges in working with them is that they can be somewhat ambiguous. Do these dates refer to the application date, or to the date the patent was actually granted? And with which national or international patent office?
Fortunately, Google Patents casts a wide net. I searched both patents separately, but each yielded hundreds of results. Adding the keyword “music” substantially thinned the number of hits I received. I noticed that only one inventor had filed a music-related patent on both days: a John W. Whitlock of Rising Sun, Indiana. As I read through the patents – linked here and here – I found that neither sketch really resembled the instrument in our collection. But there was enough in the descriptions (“stringed instrument,” “self-playing”) to warrant further investigation.
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The original patent sketches that lined up with the dates listed on the instrument at first didn’t seem like a match. They made much more sense, however, once it became clear that the artifact wasn’t a player piano.
Searching Whitlock’s name led me first to a listing in the archive of the Indiana Historical Society for a postcard of the J.W. Whitlock Novelty Works factory. The description mentioned that the company was known for something called an Autoharp. Subsequent searching of “Whitlock Autoharp” led me to an article by an independent scholar, Rick Crandall. This gave me a visual confirmation that our mystery instrument was, in fact, a Whitlock Automatic Harp.
As it happens, there were several encyclopedias in Ingenium’s library with information about the Whitlock harp. But without knowing what to look for in their indexes, it was unlikely that I would have stumbled across these pages on my own. Google Patents gave me the initial bread crumbs I needed to locate this existing scholarship on the harp.
But Ingenium’s library isn’t comprehensive: there are always gaps, which led me to search online for additional sources. Often, my first step would be to look at message boards of collectors and enthusiasts to gather clues for further research. This is a useful first step, as hobbyists often have an underestimated expertise. But because we can’t always confirm their credentials, we want to vet information that we find online by supplementing it with professionally published sources.
For Ingenium’s electronic musical instruments, I turned to the Music Magazines Archive, which has digitized issues of electronic music magazines from the 1970s and 1980s. For more eclectic artifacts, such as the Great British Spring – another artifact in Ingenium’s musical instrument collection – these specialty magazines were often the only written sources I could find outside of online message boards. Another rather simple internet resource I took advantage of was HathiTrust, a public domain repository of digitized print materials sourced from a consortium of universities and research libraries. This gave me access to useful texts such as Michel’s Piano Atlas, which helped in dating a number of our pianos from their serial numbers.
Similarly, institutions such as the Toronto Public Library have created their own online archives of digitized materials. This was useful in finding trade literature from Toronto-based instrument manufacturers such as the Newcombe Piano Company, with one of my favourite finds being the promotional sheet music that manufacturers released around the turn of the century. While researching this collection, I printed many such sources to include in Ingenium’s supplemental information files for artifacts in its collection. These printed sources can then be used by future researchers, even if the original website the source was republished on becomes inactive or goes offline.
Unfortunately, this is a very real danger with digital sources. Even while I was writing this article, the Toronto Public Library’s digital archive went down due to an apparent cyberattack. Similarly, I noticed that many of the web sources cited by previous researchers working on catalogue entries were now dead links. This illustrates the fragility of digital resources and the need to create paper copies in the event that an archive or web source goes offline.
Many instrument manufacturers around the turn of the century published promotional sheet music, much of which has been digitized and is now available online.
One final tool that I was able to use during my research project was Google Lens, which is built into my smartphone’s camera app.
Google Lens uses optical character recognition (OCR) to identify text in an image, which can then be translated by the app or copied into a search bar. Google Lens can also be used to search by image. But the technology isn’t foolproof: OCR often mistakes older typography (such as the long “s” or the Latin “u/v”) for contemporary characters, and while its image searches can be supplemented with keywords, they often yield thematically similar hits rather than exact matches.
One of the stranger items in Ingenium’s musical instrument collection is a musical jug: a stoneware decanter with a music box movement built into the bottom. When the jug is picked up, a spring-loaded “brake” disengages, enabling the music box mechanism in the bottom to play if wound. When I began researching this artifact, I could find virtually no information about it, beyond a few articles about musical pottery that had been published by the Music Box Society of Great Britain. Taking a photo of the medallion on the musical jug and searching it in Google Lens with the additional keyword “BPOE” was enough to confirm that this was some kind of promotional item associated with the American fraternal organization the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks.
Photo Credit
Nicholas Surges
In addition to helping us solve what the “BPOE” on the jug meant, Google Lens provided search results of several ceramic jugs with similar designs, suggesting possible manufacturers and perhaps a more accurate date-range for this artifact.
Sometimes, even Google Lens’s more holistic search pattern is unexpectedly helpful. Without a keyword (or when entering “music”), searching the above image gave me a number of matches for whiskey decanters with a similar design, including one Fulper musical jug with the same silhouette. Many of these hits from auction sites were dated from the 1920s or 1930s, shifting our original date estimate back by 20 to 30 years. While this is not in itself conclusive, these are more bread crumbs I can leave behind for future researchers to explore.
As a History major whose own specializations lie far from musical instruments or communication technologies, I very much had to rely on a combination of old-fashioned research and digital sleuthing in order to identify more about some of Ingenium’s instruments. Even when I was unable to completely “solve” an object, I could usually uncover something to assist future researchers working with this collection. It will be exciting to see what these researchers may be able to do with this information, and how new, publicly-accessible digital tools may further enhance their ability to document this collection moving forward.
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Nicholas Surges
Nicholas Surges is currently pursuing his Master's in Public History with a specialization in Curatorial Studies at Carleton University. He has previously worked with Ingenium researching Canada’s LGBT Purge. His current work with Ingenium’s musical instruments collection is a departure from his thesis, which examines the Mayerling Incident through the lens of rumour and mythmaking.
