If you walk past the Engineer Cafe in Fukuoka you probably won't realise what's hidden inside. The grand double height windows and red brick exterior echo Tokyo station (no surprise as they were both designed by Kingo Tatsuno) but take a step inside and you will be transported into a modern hackerspace. You can't miss the VR headsets, sensors, micro-controllers and 4k screens that are in constant use.
I have been working in this space as a community manager since 2019, through the lows of covid and the highs of our triumphant re-opening. Usually, we host every kind of workshop, tech meetup and community event. I wanted to bring something new into the space. While in London I stumbled upon the perfect inspiration: a street organ at London Bridge station
Pipe organs are an instrument with a long history. In fact, even a 'modern' organ might be 100 years old. Due to their large size and intimate connection to the installation space new pipe organs are seldom built, they merely evolve over time. While the techniques of producing pipe organs are anything but modern, I set out to find out if it was possible to build a pipe organ with standard hackerspace tools.
After some initial planning and prototyping I sat down with a composer, Jay Pallerino to get his thoughts on what would be possible. We decided a limited number of pipes was necessary for finishing the build. We also settled upon connecting the organ to an internet portal, allowing people from all around the world to access and 'play' it. Fearful of a crowdsourced chaos we chose to allow people to combine snippets of music into longer melodies.
Jay Pallerino comments on the challenges of this composing task:
This has been one of the most unique projects I have ever had to work for. Every previous composition I have worked on has been either for an acoustic or digital instrument. Musical understanding as to the limitations and variables with regard to human players (i.e. player skill, player ensemble number/strength, timbre, instrument range, venue, etc) must be taken more into consideration than with pre-recorded and digital instruments (midi) where often bringing a sound font (such as a flute) well below or above its playable range can result in interesting sounds to play with.
Too many options however, may lead to a form of artistic paralysis whereas restrictions often lead to creative workarounds and discoveries.
While working on this project the biggest ‘difficulty’ (or perhaps artistic restriction, in a good way) was in writing for an instrument that doesn’t exist. What degree of attack, sustain and decay is the instrument capable of? How fast can a note be produced? How many notes can be played at once? (is polyphonic writing possible?) Will there be a pedal? What will it even sound like? Etc, etc. When I began the compositional process none of this was known.
I did however, know two things, the initial project would be an organ with limited range and music would be generated through random users from around the world via an app where they could interact and ‘compose’ their own tracks from a series of pre-composed (and not AI generated) clips that could be interchanged in any degree.
One of the first ideas for a collection of music clips, since users would be anonymously interacting with each other from around the world, was to create musical lines that could be reminiscent of the various folk music from around the globe, though when interchanging them in random orders this idea soon began to break down.
I knew I wanted to keep a ‘folk song’ like quality to the music rather than something more avant-garde or atonal for the fact that the music would be played in a public space and therefore resigned to keep within a more diatonic tonal language, but the issue of being able to create music where clips could be interchanged still hung in the air. So I landed on taking a page out of jazz (though the piece does not have a jazz quality to it), namely, following a chord progressing that certain clips could be locked into and therefore a semblance of a bespoke melody would emerge.
But which chord progression to choose? I created a few original progressions but kept finding myself moving back to folk music so ultimately landed on using a variation of La Folia as it is incredibly well known and one of the most oft played (and recognizable) progressions.
Overall, the idea of having the public engaged using both the analog and the digital was very attractive to me. this has been a fascinating and challenging project that I myself look forward to hearing for the first time.
The air starts its journey at the blower. In a church organ this would originally have been hand pumped bellows. Some accounts say that 70 men were required to manually pump bellows before the advent of electric blowers. In the connected organ an industrial fan provides the air source. Pressure is regulated by two sensors either side of the fan. This is one of the many examples of a mechanical analogue system being replaced by a digital one for this build. When the pipes sound the pressure inside the system dips and the fan is spun up to compensate.
After passing through the blowing the air finds itself in a wind chest. The wind chest distributes air to each of the pipes by way of a series of servos. Each servo controls the airflow for a single pipe. The servos are controlled by an ESP32 microcontroller, allowing for wireless adjustment.
The pipes sit on top of the windchest. Each pipe consists of a 3D printed head and a laser cut wooden tube. 3D printing is a modern additive manufacturing process that allows this key part of the organ to be produced in a single piece. 3D printing is uniquely able to produce empty spaces inside objects for resonators and musical instruments. The pipes themselves are based around common historical designs but I would love to explore more modern techniques for producing such designs.