Museo Virtuale degli Strumenti Musicali Persiani Preislamici

My doctoral thesis investigates the origin, the evolution and the latest technological and digital experiments of the "virtual museum" with a practical application on ancient Persian musical instruments that is through the digitalization of information sheets, coming from the National Museum of Tehran, and the preparation of the rooms in "panorama" mode, of the museum. The reason for this choice is based on the following findings: 1. Iran, in spite of the continuous technological evolution based on web based technologies, and the availability on the international market of the most advanced photographic and scanning technologies, is struggling to implement virtual setting up solutions due to the lack of specialized technicians in Iran. My thesis therefore endowed the Tehran National Museum with the first example of a "virtual museum" of pre-Islamic Persian musical instruments and called it "Ancient Iranian musical instruments"; 2. According to the reports and research tables, published in the Iranian sector magazines, it is emphasized that it is vital for the national economy to update the museology and museological system through the digitalization and virtualization of the museum offer. Furthermore, technological adaptation, aimed at favoring museum-public interaction, is the new opportunity that international museum institutions are developing to attract visitors and establish a deep, lasting and sustainable loyalty relationship. See the case histories and articles quoted in the "State of the art" of this thesis, and specifically the Museo Novecento in Florence, the "Virtual Museum of Porrajmos in Italy" and the "Google Art Project" together with the museological documents and museographic works published by the International Council of Museums in 2015 and 2016; 3. In Iran, virtual museums, currently active, do not implement up-to-date audio-video multimedia solutions as they focus exclusively on video or images, separately. In my thesis I proposed multimedia audio-video solutions combined with interactive solutions; Furthermore, the thesis aims to demonstrate the importance of the "social" dimension of museum institutions and their virtualization "moves towards the social" because it improves the openness towards the public, people and users of museums. So from the methodological point of view the thesis analyzed the evolution of the concepts of museology, from the point of view of traditional and virtual set-up, of the evolution of the function of the "museum", and of the museum professions which, in recent years, they have been defined and classified by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the most important non-profit organization that associates all the most important European and international museums. Some case histories of museology / virtual museography have been provided, among the most important in Italy and in the world. The conclusions, therefore, will demonstrate that the technological adaptation of the museum offer in Iran is fundamental because it will help the institutions in the dissemination of the artistic and cultural heritage to different audiences, disseminated even outside the national borders, also divulging the museum brands. In my virtual museum I focused on the ancient pre-Islamic Persian instruments, a feature little considered at both national and global level. The reason for the choice is based on the lack of virtual museums or on the problems that exist in them in Iran and also on the importance of enhancing these ancient Persian instruments for which virtual museums have never been created due to the lack of specialized technicians. From a design point of view, the museum virtualization proposed by me intends to investigate the most innovative methodologies of user friendly interfaces for video rendering of virtualized objects (instruments and musical pieces of the pre-Islamic Persian tradition, no longer existing, existing and no longer in use and existing and usable) for which I am creating historical and informative cards dedicated to the scholars of the field. But the site also provides a more informative part, for the common visitor, thanks to the use of specially created audio-video material. Through the site, I mean: • Demonstrate the role of ancient instruments in the construction of Persian historicalcultural heritage; • Collect all musicological information, testimonies and criticism in a single virtual space; • Create an accessible space where to exercise the social dimension of the museological institution and develop a space in which all the information useful for the study of these tools is collected. So I collected documents, images, audio, data and information from the National Museum of Tehran and researchers and trainees analyzing existing virtual museums dedicated to musical instruments or sites related to music museums and studying articles, books, magazines, studies, documents for facilitate the knowledge of this topic. It should be noted that it was not possible to retrieve the complete document references of all the instruments included in the site and concerning the development of musical instruments outside Persian territory, as non-existent, as reported and confirmed by Prof. Babak Khazraee, Lecturer at the College of music of the Tehran University of Art, Houman Asaadi Iranian musician with Ph.D. and Lecturer at Tehran University of Art and Tehran University of Fine Arts and Hossein Mysami Lecturer at Tehran University Music College and Azad University of Qazvin. Some cases, on the contrary, this difficulty did not occur and, in the chapter on the "project" of the virtual museum, it was possible to insert all the necessary information. The project will therefore be very useful for consultation and possible updating (wikipedia model) by musicologists, researchers and trainees of the most important national and international cultural institutions, encouraging cultural exchanges between the institutions.