Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » Kircher’s Mathematical Organ

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April 5th, 2006

Kircher’s Mathematical Organ

Father Kircher’s Organum Mathematicum was one of the predecessors of the modern computer. Based on John Napier’s multiplying rulers (Napier’s Bones), the device encapsulated a great deal of the useful mathematical knowledge of the day, and allowed the user to perform 10 different kinds of tasks:

ARITHMETIC: a standard set of Napier’s bones together with addition and subtraction tables.

GEOMETRY: tablets whose primary purpose was to solve problems encountered in survey work.

FORTIFICATION: tablets which would aid the gentleman soldier in constructing military fortifications.

CALENDAR: tablets used in determining the date of Easter and the dates of the other major Christian festivals.

GNOMICS: tablets to calculate parameters to construct sun dials on all surfaces independent of their direction or inclination.

SPHERICS: tablets which would help in calculating the movement of the sun, determine the times of sunrise and sunset for any given day or year, and other similar problems.

PLANETARY MOVEMENTS: tablets to perform calculations to determine the motion of the planets and to cast horoscopes.

EARTHWORKS: two sets of tablets dealing with the calculations involved in cut and fill problems for the construction of canals and civil engineering.

MUSIC: tablets which would aid the novice in composing music and creating melodies.

Jim Bumgardner, who created the Kircherian Coverpop, is working on a very exciting project to emulate the last of those functions, the organum’s music composition tables. Currently, his perl program is capable of generating about a million unique pieces of music following Kircher’s templates. Eventually, he hopes to build a physical reproduction of the Organum to house the software: “The box will resemble the real thing, and will contain wooden rods, which trigger hidden switches which operate the software. The box will have a MIDI output in the back and will be used in live performance”

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