The mystery of irrecoverable sound is a problem faced by scholars of early music in nearly every aspect of research. All we have at our disposal is musical notation, often fragmentary, and circumstantial evidence, inevitably incomplete, to help us imagine how the music of the past may have sounded. While the scholarly debates surrounding ‘historically informed performance’ have largely abandoned the notion that sonic reconstructions of earlier musical repertories – in the manner of museum pieces – are possible or even desirable, the matter of ‘unknowables’ in the history of music remains central to musicological inquiry. In the introduction to The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds, Martha Feldman writes,

中文翻译：

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自然的声音？

难以恢复的声音之谜是早期音乐学者几乎在所有研究领域都面临的问题。我们所拥有的只是音乐符号，通常是零碎的和间接的证据，不可避免地是不完整的，以帮助我们想象过去的音乐可能是如何听起来的。尽管围绕“历史知情表演”的学术辩论在很大程度上放弃了这样的观念，即以博物馆作品的方式对早期音乐曲目进行声音重建是可能的，甚至是可取的，但音乐史上“不可知”的问题仍然是核心问题。音乐学探究。玛莎·费尔德曼（Martha Feldman）在《 The Castrato：自然与种类的反思》的导言中写道：