What Did the Instruments in Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights Sound Like? Oxford Scholars Recreate Them

"A group of musicologists, craftspeople and academics from the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Oxford, took it upon themselves to actually build the instruments depicted in Hieronymus Bosch's action-packed triptych- the hell harp, the violated lute, the grossly oversized hurdy-gurdy ...And then they played them."

"Unfortunately, the new additions don't sound very good. 'Horrible' and 'painful' are among the adjectives the Bate Collection manager Andrew Lamb uses to describe the aural fruits of his team's months-long labors."

"The Bosch experiment added ten more instruments to the museum's already impressive, over 1000-strong collection of woodwinds, percussion, and brass, many from the studios of esteemed makers, some dating all the way back to the Renaissance."

Researchers from Oxford University's Bate Collection of Musical Instruments undertook an ambitious project to build and play the instruments depicted in Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. The team constructed ten instruments including a hell harp, violated lute, and oversized hurdy-gurdy based on Bosch's visual representations. Upon playing these reconstructed instruments, the musicologists found they produced deliberately unpleasant, cacophonous sounds described as horrible and painful. This discovery suggests Bosch intentionally designed these instruments to create discordant noise appropriate to the hellish scenes depicted in his artwork. The Bate Collection, which houses over 1,000 historical instruments from the Renaissance onward, added these reconstructions to its holdings.

Read at Open Culture