-- forwarded message, please reply to sender and MMD --

I posted yesterday about hooking up students with instrument owners and
have been gratified and cheered by the warm response I got.  I thought
it might be good to introduce myself to the group, since I've been
lurking for a while.

I have been studying mechanical instruments with great interest for a
few years, but my main focus to date has been not automatic music
instruments, but automatic music composition, especially old methods of
automatic music composition, such as the "dice game," falsely
attributed to Mozart.

It just so happens that the two interests, automatic instruments and
automatic composition, make a very nice fit, and I've always thought
the perfect medium for playing an automatic composition would be an
automatic instrument.

However, as you know, this doesn't happen often.  Human composers who
use computer-assisted methods are few ... just like enthusiasts of
automatic instruments.  They also tend to use computers and
synthesizers, their comfort tools of choice, or less often, human
musicians to play their results.

One of my areas of focus in recent years has been an old composing
algorithm that was described in 1650 by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius
Kircher in his book "Musurgia Universalis."  This is the same book that
has wonderful illustrations of water organs, one of which still exists
(in deplorable condition) at the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome.  See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_del_Quirinale .

Kircher's book also describes a method by which non-musicians can
compose music, an algorithm, in other words, which I implemented on a
computer.  I would very much like to modify the software, which now
outputs MIDI, ABC files, and other things, to control an organette or
other MIDI-controlled organ.  The result would be an automatic organ
capable of producing millions of pieces of authentic seventeenth
century music.  I am in the process of purchasing my first organ for
this purpose.  The first of many, I am sure!

I described this project a few years ago on my blog:
http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2006/04/02/organum-mathematicum/  I will
be delivering a paper about my Kircher project at the Bridges (music +
math) conference this summer in Banff, as well as another paper about
my Whitney Music Box, which I'll describe another time.

I am happy to provide transcripts to those people who are interested in
seventeenth century algorithms and music.

Jim Bumgardner
http://www.krazydad.com/
http://www.coverpop.com/whitney/