While the reach of the most powerful land-based broadcasters is limited by the strength of their signal, the height of their transmission tower, hills, mountains, and sunspot activity, even the gimpiest 5,000-watt 5,000-wattdio station collegeitally pipe Niradio onto the net and distatione alternative musicano the endigitally earth.
Nothing less than a series of custom-built instruments such as "a bespoke digitally-controlled pipe organ; a 30 foot pendulum that harnesses the earth's gravitational pull to create musical patterns, creating a unique bridge between the ancient and the modern; a bespoke gamelan-celeste hybrid; and a one-off extraordinary pin barrel harp".
Every wire, pillar and pipe is digitally modelled, which helps to prevent the costly mistakes that can arise if members of the design team are working under different assumptions about where bits of the building go.
"There hasn't been any money spent on the instrument," he said, adding that he had digitally recorded all its 2,644 pipes and hoped to use the record to show potential donors how it could sound even better if restored.
He has five different studios at his home in Scotland — one has been built to his specs from the ground up — and owns pipe organs that are digitally controlled and robots that play the drums.
That means that when the organist pulls a stop on the console to signal, say, an English horn or a chime or a flute and then touches the keyboard, the people sitting in the pews hear a digitally sampled version of a horn, a chime or a flute pipe recorded elsewhere.
In organ lofts throughout the country, relatively inexpensive circuits and loudspeakers playing digitally sampled sounds are taking the place of costly organ pipes.
This included components to turn a digitally encoded music file into a conventional audio file, the chip that enables the device to use FireWire both as a pipe for digital data and battery charging and the central processing unit that acts as the sort of taskmaster for the various components.
The film now opens in the book-lined study of Mortimer Young, a goggle-eyed, pipe-smoking film preservationist who calls the work "an exquisite masterpiece" and assures us it has been "digitally swabbed, the boring parts have been taken out and other things (pause) added".
Fingerprints are digitally recorded.
They phone home, digitally.
