A Singing Bone from the Mätäjärvi (‘Rotten Lake’) Quarter of Medieval Turku, Finland: Experimental Reconstructions and Contemporary Musical Exploration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, in the town of Turku (SW Finland), a new quarter was built near a lake that came to be known as Mätäjärvi (‘Rotten Lake’), possibly because it was polluted by the waste from leather tanners, shoemakers, and other artisans. In the excavated remains of a wooden house in this quarter, objects like leather shoes, clippings and scrapings, imported stoneware from Germany, bone beads, spindles, and numerous bones of young cats, dogs, sheep, pigs and cattle were found, allowing the conclusion this might have been an artisan’s dwelling. On the premises, a part of a worked sheep shin bone was found that we have interpreted as a flute of the block-and-duct type with two or three finger holes. This is a rare find for Finland, where, contrary to other parts of Europe, only a very small number of bone wind instruments are known, all dating from the late Middle Ages and nearly all found in Turku. This flute was a coarsely made simple instrument with a small ambitus. In many regions, flutes were traditionally played by shepherds as a means to communicate with their flock and as entertainment while herding. As we know that sheep and other domestic animals were kept in Turku, it is tempting to interpret the flute as a shepherd’s instrument, but sources pertaining to the use of this particular artefact are lacking. We made two hypothetical reconstructions of the flute from similarly shaped and sized unprovenanced medieval sheep shin bones, one with two finger holes and the other with three finger holes. Flutist and sound artist Taina Saarikivi then explored the musical possibilities of the three-holed reconstruction by experimenting with it for over a year, making this medieval instrument sound or sing again.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".