smem - Swiss Museum & Center for Electronic Music Instruments

The smem, the Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music Instruments, has one of the world's largest and most important collections of synthesizers, organs, drum machines, effects equipment, mixing consoles, amplifiers and studio equipment. Around 5000 instruments and devices are stored in its Schaulager in the BlueFactory innovation centre in Fribourg, Switzerland. Conceived as a living archive, the collection is intended to be accessible to artists, the general public and researchers. A selection of important electronic musical instruments can be used and experimented in the smem Playroom.

The smem was born from the collection of Klemens Niklaus Trenkle from Basel. For 40 years, Klemens devoted himself to the collection of electronic musical instruments and built up the major part of this extraordinary collection. In 2016, the smem association contractually received the collection and committed itself to preserving it in a centre and making it accessible to the public through mediation and documentation projects. With the collection, the smem also adopted Klemens' vision that all electronic instruments are unique witnesses to our history and to the history of electronic and popular musics, past, present and future.

Since smem's foundation, the collection has grown by several hundred instruments. All have been generously donated to the smem by their owners or acquired by patrons, as the smem has no financial resources for acquisitions.

The basis of this impressive heritage is made up of analogue and digital sound devices, synthesizers, organs, drum machines and effects of all kinds and from the last decades. The collection also includes studio and stage equipment, recorders, mixers, amplifiers, electric guitars, speakers, PCs and microphones.

Today, the collection is stored, maintained and displayed in a collection space of only 600 m2. In the medium term, many of the instruments and devices on the smem site will be well documented and available to the general public through a virtual collection. For other presentations and exhibitions in the centre, more space for display and use is currently lacking. For musicians, a selection of valuable instruments are available in the smem Playroom and allow everyone, whether a novice or an expert, to come discover and record the voice of these historic machines.