I was listening to some of these tracks over the weekend, awesome stuff!

That's right. Yes, I am still in contact with Kent. I can relay a message to him for you.

Machine automation was common even at the time of the project. In a way so was automation of musical instruments going back to player instruments controlled by paper rolls. However, computers were still quite mysterious to the average person because this was before personal computers. I think there was a curiosity factor when we said we have a computer that plays the pipe organ.

There was another thing that was unique at the time. We were using something call Linear Music Language (LML) to program the music. I believe it was the creation of Robert Bennion although it might have been architected by Prentiss Knowlton and implemented by Robert. LML allowed us to specify the music as a sequential ASCII string. The job of the PDP-8 was to read that ASCII text, which was punched on 1" wide paper tape using a teletype, and convert it into the parallel bits needed to play the organ. I don't know of anything else at the time that was doing something like that.

The bottom line is of course the music. None of us were even remotely close to being concert organists. Prentiss was the most trained musically. R. Kent Asmussen programmed most of the music and he was just a self-taught musicoligist. He had to learn to read music to do the transcriptions. Mind you he was a VERY good student and a quick study. The music was best when we were doing a highly technical piece with demanding technical requirements. It was not so good for expressive performance.

There are some passages such as the intricate Pedal solo in Ives' Variations on America where the computer really shone. I felt that human performances sounded like the organist was playing with ski boots on after hearing the computer do it. There was one time when we were playing the organ with the computer and an organist who was doing a recital the next day playing the same piece remarked that he found the computer perfomance "interesting" because we were using an interpretation of the rhythm called for in the written notes in our edition of the music but which would be difficult, but not impossible, for a human performer. This was a subtlety I'm not sure I could hear but we were able to program exactly what we wanted performed mathematically whether or not we knew how that would sound.

Today, all of this is pretty primitive compared to what can be done with MIDI and sequencer software. I am still involved with organs and many organs today include MIDI playback and recording. My view tends to be that MIDI playback is inherently uninteresting. Even at the time of Unplayed By Human Hands I began to form the opinion that musical performances are about the communication between people. Once the novelty wears off, what people will come back to is wanting to hear how people express the music. When they go to an organ concert, they mostly want to see an organist on the bench and feel that the organist is conveying something to them musically with human emotion that is being shaped as the artist communicates with the audience.

Nonetheless, there are some pieces that were recorded on the Unplayed By Human Hands records that are good performances that hold up well even today. The quirky footnote about how the performances were realized gives them a little bit of uniqueness.