Music Week on the Kircher Society Blog

The splendid Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society blog is having a music week (or, as they put it, Kircherian Harmonics Week). First up, the Arca Musarythmica: "a device by which a non-musician could compose a piece of four-part music using prearranged musical fragments". In other words - a hardware, not quite real time version of Ableton Live, from 1650 (really is spooky how much the top part looks like Ableton...) Then there's the Zadar Sea Organ, a huge pipe organ, played by the waves in Zadar, Croatia. Keep checking back for more. (Thanks, Kate!)


Comments:
Tim, you missed the earlier Cat Piano.

http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/?p=116

And now, Arthur Ewing and his amazing Mouse Organ...
 
Wow. I've been to Zadar several times. It's really close to Bibinje where my mom grew up and two of my uncles live. It's a cool city and a cool area.
 
Wow that water organ sounds as though it'd sound AMAZING.

HeHe - reminds me of the Bronnt Industries Kapital interview where they talk about the Lepping's Patented Lapwing Harmonium
http://www.silentagerecords.co.uk/bronnt/futureinterview.html

'We discovered it at the Cornwall Museum of Mechanical Instruments. They gave us an hour to record on it and sample it up, but we later broke in and stole it. It's a reed harmonium from 1888 that you operate with your feet, like an old pianola, and it comes with punch card backing scores which you feed into it on a revolving drum and play along to. It is the natural grandaddy of the Casiotone. It is notoriously temperamental. It needs to be re-greased and calibrated regularly.' (((some of the info in that quote may be somewhat false.!.)))
 
It's not really that 'spooky' that it looks like Live (or any other sequencer for that matter) - surely that's the most intuitive and obvious way of organising pre-recorded music (at least for Europeans organising Western music.)
 
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