Peter Blasser's superORGAN

superORGAN I: Rainforest Airport

Published on Dec 1, 2014 Peter B

These are in order. Be sure to see part 2 & 3 below for different takes. Peter Blasser is the man behind Ciat-Lonbarde.

"When a computer controls a pipe organ, it can trigger the notes really fast. If you get it fast enough, just barely attacking the pipes, it can elicit all sorts of squeals and pukes. In the computer music conference of 2014, we installed an incarnation of David Tudor's Rainforest next door to Wesleyan Chapel, in its airport-like lobby. Referring to the bacchanal nature of this lobby, and also the pre-show routines of Tudor, came half of the initial lyrics: a list of alcohols. The other half came from the odd chambres and containers used in Rainforest: a styrofoam cooler, a gourd, copper helmet. These objects all have resonant peak frequencies, of course, and a challenge came to emulate them on the pipe organ next door, so musics could waft throughout the sacred and the secular.

Thus part one in this piece for midi organ: superORGAN. Supercollider is the scripting language, and also synthesizer of accompanying sound-worlds, originally made for playing through rainforest objects, but now using the pastor's sound system in the chapel. Here is a list of pipes: vox humana, bassoon, clarinet, french horn. Here is a list of religious terms: liturgy, stole, vow, tabernacle, multi-denominational, pallium, papal, rome, synod, chalice, vespers... crypt. Note the recording is a rare, close-miking, intended to hear the strange whispers of windy pipes in the night."

SuperORGAN II: Resistor Zoo

Published on Dec 1, 2014 Peter B

"When a computer controls a pipe organ, it can trigger the notes really fast. Here the goal is to put only a tiny puff of air into a pipe, to hear the so-called chiff sound, like a consonant before the long vowel of a speaking pipe. Usually one records an organ out in the church, to hear it echoing off the walls and sounding like the voice of God in space. Here, I chose to shove the microphones physically into the chests, so you can hear the sound of various valves, squeaky bellows, and other aspects of the machinery of the universal voice.

Composing computer music for the pipe organ can entail exploring the relationship between tunings. This movement pits the scale encountered in designing an analog synthesizer tuned by raw capacitor values (tocante) against the organ's equal temperament. That forms the basis for the lyrics: "10,22,33,47,68,82,56,39,27." The dissonance between sonic systems is already present in the synthetic nature of loudspeaker sound versus the natural projection of tones by wind-pipe."

superORGAN III: Pile of Fourths

Published on Dec 1, 2014

"Adapting David Behrman's "Pile of Fourths" for the midi organ, I again came up to the possibility of dissonance in confronting tunings. The piece involves improvisational articulations on a ladder of fourths, easily played by the organ. The circle of fourths has always been a fascinating sound, but it also beguiles me with its numerical rationale of compounded powers of three. Did Pythagoras mean that we can hear exponents? Maybe we can, but I chose to command Supercollider to immediately calculate harmonic approximations to the pile of fourths, according to different sub-octaves of A440.

The contrasting pitch material decided, all I needed was a gradient fade between the pipe organ and the computer music. Difficult to fade a pipe organ, so I decided to use patterns to create a sort of primitive, MIDI pulse width modulation, starting with full duty cycle, and ending in the shortest, chiffest clicks of notes. Likewise, I faded the computer music up in a granular way, extending event envelopes from very short to legato in gesture."