Punching the Monkey...Organ

Instead of the high-tech gadgetry we had been seeing, like remote-controlled flamethrowers and accelerometer-based geodata visualizers, there was a little car filled with whimsical woodcarvings. The "engine" of the car, though, contained a wonderful hand-cranked organ. (See photo.)

I whipped out my stereo voice recorder and captured this snippet:

• The Crankabout Organ

(Notice how the tempo changes with the speed of the cranking.) The instrument's creator, Ernie Fosselius, then confided that the punched paper rolls that drive the organ are derived from MIDI files! Up close, you can see the similarity to a MIDI piano roll view:

This punched scroll gates the air through the organ pipes.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, Fosselius had more surprises up his sleeve. He describes himself as an "old time whittler, caricaturist, and wood-carving teacher," but spent decades working in Hollywood as an actor and sound editor. You can hear his voice in Return of the Jedi and see more of his tongue-in-cheek stylings in the cult classic Hardware Wars. That mix of high-tech and whimsy permeated this e-mail he sent after the conference, after I wrote requesting more information on the organ.

Thanks for your interest in the crank organ. This type of organ, sometimes called a "monkey organ" or "busker organ," has been around for possibly centuries. So there are a lot of tunes that have been arranged over the years for the common 21-note scale (three bass notes). People who distribute these arrangements have traditionally had to either punch out copies by using the original roll as a template, or mark off the hole positions also by using the original roll as a template. Either way, the rolls had to be punched out by hand. To facilitate mass production, sometimes, but not always, a MIDI program may now be used to translate the musical arrangement onto paper in the form of printed dots and dashes. The rolls still need to be punched out by hand using a punch that registers and aligns over each of the 21 holes. But that's the only brush with any kind of computer interface that this medium has had.

Now lately there are some distributors that use laser technology to create the holes, which is, of course, more efficient and more accurate with fewer "hanging chads." The price for these rolls, however, is prohibitively expensive, at least for me. I imagine tooling up to produce something with a very limited market would seem foolish to most people.

But the system is elegantly simple. When you turn the crank, the paper roll advances and a bellows is worked which pumps air into the chamber where the roll is passing over a manifold of 21 holes. When a punched hole passes over its corresponding hole in the manifold, air is forced through, down a tube to the whistle or pipe which is tuned to the proper note. Many notes may sound at the same time, creating chords.

The idea and creative challenge of the Crankabout Mechanical Theater, as with the Mechalodeon before it, was to create a complete and unique form of entertainment, [using] mechanical devices made mostly of wood, which would also include music, and all human powered and totally off the grid. That also included the vehicle it's all mounted on, basically a pedal car. So yes, motors, electrical and electronic devices, computers, MIDI systems, etc., might make it all run smoother and more efficiently, but the uniqueness, simplicity, and artistic point would be lost. Along with the entertainment value which is largely derived from its ironic contrast to such technologically advanced surroundings as O'Reilly or Pixar, where it appeared this summer.

By the way, the figure on the front of the organ is a caricature of a character in a bad gorilla mask that was in "The Nairobi Trio," a sketch that appeared on Ernie Kovacs's TV show in the Fifties. Kovaks was a genius TV anarchist that abused the medium to great comic effect.

I hope that answers your questions.

May The Farce Be With You!

Ernie Fosselius

Fosselius doesn't have a Web site (I'm told he hands out flyers and postcards that say "Analog Website" on them), but there's more fun history on his Wikipedia page. You can also see his sculptures in action in the Heavenly States' "Car Wash" video.

Update, 2006-09-20: Make magazine filmed this tour of Fosselius' studio, with closeups of the ingenious mechanisms in action.

Update, 2006-12-27: Here's a longer interview I did with Fosselius for Make.