Aural Relics of Operating System's Past - Hyperprism Stand-alone

Hyperprism stand-alone for OS9

Named after the Edgard Varese composition of the same name and coming before the Korg Kaoss Pad, before 'bit crushing' was a term used in music production, we had the Hyperprism stand-alone for OS9. A set of over 25 x/y grid controllable effects that ranged from bread and butter compressors and EQs to Eventide-inspired DSP manglers. Notable effects included the Sonic Decimator, Frequency Shifter, Bass Maximizer and Harmonic Exciter. Even with the high quality mastering plugins like Waves, there hasn't been anything close to what the Bass Maximizer was capable of. You are able to take a bird chirping recording and add deep realistic bass & subharmonic bass tones to it.

The x/y grid could be controlled with a mouse, which at the time was a huge leap forward in and of itself. You could actually then record and then playback x/y grid automation, at least 2 full minutes worth. Kush Arora's early noise project Involution would lug out multiple G3 powermacs running Hyperprism at his shows. I remember checking out the computer screens on their setups right before they were about to go on and they always had these crazy spectrograph looking premade automation patterns ready to go. Unfortunately, the only version of Hyperprism that’s easy to find these days is a Dxi plugin for Windows. The Windows plugin version of Hyperism, even up to its last rumored iteration, always stayed somewhat behind its Mac counterpart.

The x/y recording feature was never an option, nor was running Hyperprism standalone on Windows. It's buggy on anything past Windows xp, and most host sequencers don't accommodate DirectX plugins anymore.

When hyperprism was first on the scene there weren't any high quality native digital reverbs for the computer platform. 'Hyperverb' in the hyperprism suite was worth the price of admission alone, offering rich realistic room tones with drone capable reverb tails.

There are a couple of stores on the net that seem to have sealed copies of the OS9 version of Hyperprism for sale, and one of them charges $259 for it. The only problem is. even if you absolutely had to have a used OS9 copy, you'd still have to have access to a SCSI floppy mac G3 to run the copy protection scheme, and who knows if 15 years later you'd even get it to work without some kind of challenge/response from the long out of existence Aboretum company. And to top it off, there is little chance, unless you are a UNIX configurist, of getting some sort of virtual floppy drive

workaround in an emulated OS9 legacy

mode running on a newer mac with OSX.

Status: virtually unfindable for mac, directx plugin version 2.5 easily obtainable for windows




Edgard Varèse - Hyperprism (1923)