The Global Hyperorgan is an intercontinental, creative space for acoustic musicking. Existing pipe organs around the world are networked for real-time, geographicallydistant performance, with performers utilizing instruments and other input devices to collaborate musically through the voices of the pipes in each location. A pilot study was carried out in January 2021, connecting two large pipe organs in Piteå, Sweden, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A quartet of performers tested the Global Hyperorgan’s capacities for telematic musicking through a series of pieces. The concept of modularity is useful when considering the artistic challenges and possibilities of the Global Hyperorgan. We observe how the modular system utilized in the pilot study afforded multiple experiences of shared instrumentality from which new, synthetic voices emerge. As a long-term technological, artistic and social research project, the Global Hyperorgan offers a platform for exploring technology, agency, voice, and intersubjectivity in hyper-acoustic telematic musicking.

This article presents several scenarios in which a live coding environment called Paragraph was utilised to telematically play networked and geographically distributed hyperorgans. Situated within the framework of the Global Hyperorgan project, the TCP/Indeterminate Place Quartet have explored the affordances of the organ network through the concept of Tele-Copresence. By outsourcing certain dimensions of the parameter space of the Paragraph language to other members of the quartet, a shared instrumentality is enabled, where the organs are collaboratively controlled by means of this system. Rooted in a personal composer-performer practice and studied from the perspective of the live coder, the Paragraph system, adapted to the TCP/Indeterminate Place environment, can be understood as a modular system of human and non-human agents, into which the other musicians are patched. The distributed parameter space utilised, thus resembles a shared cantus firmus, a foundational, but dynamically changing, ecology for the live coder to play within.

This performance with the TCP/Indeterminate Place quartet activates a telematic connection in which two concert hall pipe organs, in two different locations in Europe, are controlled remotely. It is a realization of a new scenario in the Global Hyperorgan project, in which the quartet is divided in two duos, situated in different locations. Such interactions are emblematic of the intersections of the technical, artistic and social aspects at the heart of the Global Hyperorgan and illustrative of the thick and pervasive mediating dynamics endemic to all musicking. Global Hyperorgan participants are compelled to develop new models of instrumentality for new modes of musicking. TCP, in the name of the quartet, refers to the combination of Telepresence and Copresence, in the neologism Tele-Copresence, as an expression of our central interest in the sense of presence in musical interactions enabled by telematic performance. By Indeterminate Place, we refer to the experience of place in tele-copresence as sometimes characterised by a mediated, liminal space. The Global Hyperorgan contributes a particular potential for exploration of concert spaces that carry particular acoustic affordances, as well as socio-historical characteristics. In tele-copresence, these are at times molded together in Indeterminate Place.

Sestina, av TCP/IP kvartett och Åsa Unander-Scharin är ett ca 40 minuter långt verk, där ny musik, som skapats genom en radikal omtolkning av Monteverdis partitur, omger varje sats av det ursprungliga verket. En central faktor är hur både en dansare och två musiker styr Studio Acusticums hyperorgel, och därigenom iscensätter en läsning av Monteverdi som stundtals går långt in i körverkets detaljer, och i andra delar söker ett fågelperspektiv och väver in körmusiken i en långt större form. 

TCP/INDETERMINATE PLACE QUARTET bildades 2021 och består av Federico Visi, Robert Ek, Mattias Petersson och Stefan Östersjö. Klarinettisten Robert Ek och tonsättaren Mattias Petersson är båda doktorander vid Musikhögskolan i Piteå och knutna till forskningsklustret GEMM (Gesture, Embodiment and Machines in Music) där Federico Visi gjort ett postdoktoralt forskningsprojekt. Klustret leds av Stefan Östersjö, professor i Musikalisk gestaltning och ämnesföreträdare vid Musikhögskolan. Kvartetten tilldelades ”Best Music Award” först vid NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) i Shanghai och sedan vid “Audio Mostly” i Graz. Båda prisen delades ut 2021, med hänvisning till kvartettens banbrytande spel med distansstyrda orglar, som utvecklats inom ramen för det internationella projekt Global Hyperorgan. 

This global hyperorgan performance is a site-specific exploration, connecting sonic traces, archive recordings, interviews and field recordings to memory of place. The places share historical moments of division, and of reconciliation. Each location holds one or more pipe organs, which can be controlled remotely. In the creation of the piece, dividing the quartet in two duos is a fundamental building block. While the duos develop individual materials, the composition also explores how they can be united. One of the connecting points is the Fantasia in c-minor BWV 562 by J.S. Bach, which provides the basic material for the interaction with the pipe organs. 

Acknowledging the social, cultural and immaterial aspects of musicking, but also the cybernetic perspectives on musical instruments, this composition applies an expanded understanding of pieces and instruments as interactive modular musicking systems. 

Using this mindset as a conceptual framework, and applied as an analysis to the famous Chaconne from J.S. Bach’s Partita in d minor for solo violin, BWV 1004, a new interpretation and re-composition of the original has been made. By deconstructing and modularizing the system that the score, Bach's composition, the instrument, and the performance practice comprise, the aim with this project was to re-patch the agencies of these components of the system, in order to reshape the Chaconne into a new piece, but also to make an interpretation of certain aspects of Bach’s compositional methods.

Mattias Petersson debuts on the Swiss label Hallow Ground with »Triangular Progressions,« a suite in nine parts written entirely in the SuperCollider environment using additive synthesis. The starting point for the evocative piece is a magic number triangle that Petersson invented during his early composition studies and which has been an obsession of the artist for over twenty years, previously forming the foundation of many other of his works. By exploring the harmonic progressions found hiding within the triangle, »Triangular Progressions« at once emits a sense of introspective calm that fosters deep listening and evokes a whole spectrum of emotions, mediating between the abstract and the visceral.

»Triangular Progressions« can be considered a perfect synthesis of Petersson’s academic interests and aesthetic ideas, combining a mathematical approach with artistic rigour. The magic number triangle highlights the beauty of symmetrical properties. By exploring its idiosyncrasies, the composer manages to translate them into engaging sounds. The lush melodies and harmonies of the music at times call to mind the intimate organ and drone works by label mates Kali Malone and Maria W Horn while also maintaining a unique signature sound. The addition of pure sinusoidal waves enables a deep listening exploration of the counterpoint between melodic and harmonic rhythms, chord structures and spectral harmonies that Petersson extrapolates from those magic numbers.

The Sinew0od system has been used as a starting point in an investigation of how translation and transcription can be used as artistic methods to understand and compose with the different agents within a cybernetic system such as this.

The pilot study of this project was a transcription for bass clarinet and was carried out in collaboration with clarinetist Robert Ek. This study was thoroughly presented in a co-authored article for the ECHO Journal (Petersson and Ek, 2022).

The Sinew0od feedback system has been used as a starting point in an investigation of how translation and transcription can be used as artistic methods to understand and compose with the different agents within a cybernetic system such as this.

Building further on the study and transcription for bass clarinet, I wanted to test how the system responded to a string instrument and got the opportunity to work with a Halldorophone , temporarily on loan to EMS – the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm.  

The Halldorophone was created by artist and designer Halldór Úlfarsson, and, besides being a string instrument somewhat resembling a cello, it also comprises its own internal feedback system with discrete electromagnetic pick-ups and volume controls for each string with a transducer speaker inside the resonant body, enabling self-oscillation. It also has four resonance strings below the fret board, with separate pickups and discrete volume controls for each.

Together with the cellist My Hellgren, who had previous experience with this instrument, I conducted a series of filmed workshops where we experimented with different types of interactions with the Sinew0od feedback system. A functional translation approach was used in the transcription process. The electroacoustic Halldorophone is a very different instrument from the previous wind-based ones, and many of the original techniques needed rethinking.

Sinew0od is a modular system where the player becomes part of a controlled feedback system. It was originally composed as a piece for Paetzold contrabass recorder, but the system’s constituent parts has since then been re-patched and further explored as a basis for new pieces. So far the system has been used in a version for bass clarinet, Halldorophone, and here in its latest iteration as a new piece for Buchla modular synthesizer with an added electroacoustic speaker. While performing the piece, the physical body of the instrument becomes both an extension and a modulator to the other parts in the system. The player navigates the feedback network by exploring and mapping the sonic affordances, using the instrument as a probe and a score as a guide.