Thoughts on the 'Studio31 knowledge system'
Voice memo by Johannes Keller. Recorded on the 5th of February 2026.
Transcript by whisper. Lightly edited, footnotes manually added.
Hello, Johannes speaking. This is me trying a new format to somehow document the many, many layers of knowledge that are collecting in the Studio31 context. This format could be leaving voice memos in all kinds of situations that will be transcribed to text and then later hopefully linked in some sort of database system. Let's see if this works.
The problem is there is so much knowledge from individual projects, from research, from conversations with other people, from teaching students, masterclasses, residencies. There's so much going on and there is not a place where we can actually store all this knowledge. What works so far is academic, scholarly writing. There are a couple of books and articles that have been published in the last, let's say, 15 years. But of course, this is a very specific kind of knowledge, knowledge that meets very high standards of verbalization and of, how to say this, high standards in terms of describing the knowledge in established terms. But there is a lot of other kinds of knowledge that are, from my point of view, quite relevant, but don't meet that standard. And there are very specific reasons for why this knowledge doesn't meet the standards (yet) to be part of a scholarly publication. The main reason is that it's so dynamic, it's constantly evolving. It often is cutting edge stuff.
That is the case for music theory research for example: There is a lot of historical repertoire we are looking at. Of course, mainly written by Nicola Vicentino, but also other composers and theorists of the 16th and 17th centuries. Their way of putting things is not embedded in an established theoretical framework. In the case of Nicola Vicentino, it's not compatible with music theory of the 16th century. And he himself is confronted with some sort of speechlessness when it comes to describing his own musical thinking and doing. I think that's one of the reasons why he calls his musical vision a 'prattica', a 'practice', because it's not a theory yet and it never became a theory. So he's operating with highly practical tools to transmit his vision. One of them is the Archiorgano and the Archicembalo, which are musical instruments that have Vicentino's musical knowledge baked in. It's not really transformed into verbal formats like a treatise or a consistent theory. This is one example of knowledge that we are working with at Studio31.
To stay with the example of Vicentino: We are still struggling today to condense his knowledge into a closed theory. And I think it's not even the point to design a theory to explain Vicentino. It's an open material with an open potential. It's more like an invitation to use it, to apply it, to experiment with it, to expand it. And therefore it's very hard to mold it into the 'timeless' and objective format of scholarly publications.
That was just one example to make my point why I think a different kind of knowledge system is necessary. Right now I'm driving the Archiorgano from Basel to Stuttgart for the Eclat Festival, for a performance of a contemporary piece. On these long drives, I do deep dives in my thoughts, and I always lose them because obviously there's never time to sit down and write up what I reflect on in the car for example, or in conversations with people. Therefore my approach for now is that I leave voice messages to myself that are then transcribed and linked together. The point of reference might be the Zettelkasten system of Nikolas Luhmann.
I use this system for my private notes and also for my knowledge system that I mainly use to write my dissertation on Vicentino. I think that could be some kind of model, but since we have a very multi-media subject, it wouldn't be enough to have little sheets of paper or little snippets of text that are linked in a database. But it's more like voice memos, snippets of audio recordings or videos, recordings and transcriptions of conversations. So we obviously need to find some sort of digital system to connect all of this. But maybe this is a first attempt to start the system.
I think another important aspect of this approach is that we have a very different density of knowledge and a very different level of theoretical knowledge of potential readers. Sometimes my conversations are pretty basic in terms of technical knowledge, but very advanced in terms of philosophical takes. But sometimes there are a lot of technical, theoretical terms. Sometimes tuning theory is very much expected knowledge of the partner in my conversations.
And I think it would be nice in order to make this accessible that anyone can speak on any level, but always on the highest level for the person who is speaking, which might not be easily understandable for a lot of people, but for some it might be, and then it's actually super interesting. But for all the people who access this knowledge system and are not that fluent in all the specifics, I would then add explanations to make a high level conversation or voice memo accessible.
I could explain certain aspects that are just taken for granted in certain contexts, to make them accessible to people and at the same time reflect on why we went there in our thinking. That could make it accessible for people without the theoretical background or students, and it could give an educational flavor to the whole database.
Let's see where this takes us, and hopefully this will grow into a larger collection and finally make visible what we are doing at Studio31, which is, I think, quite exciting and quite relevant stuff. But for now, almost all of it has been completely hidden away, except for people who we are interacting with actively, which is a pity because I realized that there are many people out there who would appreciate access. Let's see where this takes us. Thanks for listening or reading.