Recent Organ Design Innovations and the 21st-century - Stichting ...

expressive space, or use sensors strategically placed on a dancer’s body to allow him or her to
manipulate or “play” electronic or processed acoustic sounds in real time. Using a hyperorgan, dancers
could directly control acoustic sound in a virtual control space. One can imagine a dancer wearing a
haptic sleeve, a sleeve with built-in mechanical resistance devices, pulling the air and actually feeling the
resistance of the air around the organ pallet. The hyperorgan would open new horizons for such
performance media integration. In fact, the Modulorgue and Woehl organ already have all of the
necessary hardware to make the above example a reality. This application is also not too far removed
from what we have already seen with Mickaël Fourcade’s Stido system in conjunction with the
hyperorgan capabilities of the Modulorgue. The hyperorgan can be used to allow the physically
impaired, children, beginning music students, and the general public play the organ in one way or
another. In all of the cases above, the groundbreaking nature of the hyperorgan’s capabilities lies in its
ability to reclaim for the acoustic that which has until now been the exclusive domain of the electronic,
building upon contemporary electro-acoustic composers’ increasing focus on the acoustic, analog, or
“human” (in the abstract sense) element of musical performance.
One final significant application for this technology can be found in performance research. The
hyperorgan can function as a laboratory for research into keyboard psychohaptics, the underlying
feedback loop linking music cognition, physical gesture, and acoustic sound production. The integrated
electronic interfacing would provide detailed data on speed and timing of key motion, data that could
be used for empirical analysis. In addition, through the invention of a keyboard in which the key force-
displacement function can be variably mapped onto pallet motion so as to emulate the touch of any
characterized organ keyboard, a so-called “haptic keyboard,” one can quickly yield research data in a
manner that previously would have required significantly more time, travel, and expense. One could
obtain similarly interesting findings by applying hyper-organ technology to existing tracker organs with
variable transmission ratio and key motion, such as the Kraul prototypes. A field currently in its infancy,
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