Went to Oxford (England) last Saturday and visited the Pitt Rivers Museum. This is a museum attached to the Museum of Natural History (it has a homepage here).

Most museums (like the MNH) are laid out with everything labelled and quite spaced out. The Pitt Rivers isn't, apparently by design. If you've ever played the game "Shivers", you'll have a good idea of what it's like - quite spooky! Basically, it was started by one guy, General PR, who collected mostly weaponry and stuff during the Victorian era, and it's accumulated more and more stuff over the years as ppl have donated their collections of stuff to the museum. But the treat is the loose categorisation - things are roughly grouped together by type but it's not really done strictly, and the low light level means that some stuff you might miss, or some things are way up at ceiling level, so you might look up by accident and realise there's a box of shrunken heads above you!

Anyway, some of the exhibits are a load of musical instruments. There's all sorts of mouthbows, single-string and 2-string fiddles, cowrie shells, flutes and stuff like that, collected by ethnologists over the years. But there were some real oddities of European instruments in there too which caught my eye.

There's several traditionally-shaped fiddles in there. One had a wild bit of carving instead of the scroll-work, and had a small bow actually shaped like a bow - IIRC this was around 400 years old. The most impressive musically was one which had 4 strings as usually, but then also had 6 other strings which ran under the fingerboard, over a lower section on the bridge, to finish somewhere lower-down on the tailpiece. I'd guess these would provide "drone" notes by resonating freely, or would resonate on certain notes to amplify the sound.

Also several mandolin-type things in there, of various shapes, sizes and quantity of strings. One of those had 12 strings, arranged in pairs, and then had an auto-plucking mechanism on the bridge, with 6 ivory keys you'd press to play a note.

Plenty of other stuff too - I wasn't taking notes and my brain was in information overload by then! I'd recommend visiting this place if you're ever in Oxford, anyway.

On a similar theme, does anyone else have any reports of similar strange instruments seen around? By strange I don't just mean "more strings than normal", but with something genuinely different about their design. Also, does anyone know of museums which actually _play_ their collections of unusual musical instruments?

Grab.