Composer and programmer Marcin Pietruszewski is the creator of the New Pulsar Generator (nuPG), a program that synthesizes sound at the micro-temporal level – a level ranging from several hundred microseconds up to the duration of a short sound object at around 100 milliseconds – and employs sieves as a sort of formal glue sticking these small segments of sound into audible textures.

The nuPG is programmed in SuperCollider, and is an update on the original method of pulsar synthesis developed by Curtis Roads in the 1990s. The original pulsar synthesis software was released in 2001 for a MacOS that quickly became obsolete. Pietruszewski’s update comes with an intuitive graphical and text based (live-coding) interface, and a manual explaining each of the system’s parameters.

“The graphic interface immediately proposes a particular view, it contains sound theory and proposes a particular sound model,” he says. “I’m trying to consider the ways this paradigm shapes our ideas on what is possible to compose."

More of his experiments in composition using the nuPG can be heard on his album New Pulsar Generator Recordings Vol 1. His track “sieve ppts_(clusters)” is exclusive to The Wire.

Marcin Pietruszewski’s Auditory Sieve is released by ETAT; New Pulsar Generator Recordings Vol 1 is released by Fancyyyyy. His Synthetic Pulsar (Reductive-Additive) will be part of an installation at Berlin’s silent green Betonhalle in May.

Read Emily Bick's interview with Marcin Pietruszewski in The Wire 445. Subscribers can access the article via the online archive.