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The MIDI-fied Large Hot Pipe Organ 112

Ant writes: The Large Hot Pipe Organ is the world's only MIDI controlled, propane-powered explosion organ. The LHPO's pyro-acoustic explodo-rhythmations will throbbatize your earholes and dance-ify your booty and make you realize what 'Industrial Music' REALLY means!" I don't know about dance-ifying my booty, but I would love to play with this thing for a few days.
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The MIDI-fied Large Hot Pipe Organ

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  • Hooking up computers to queer objects for the purpose of music has been done before. I know someone that built a recorder (something like a flute) that worked with one of his own standars >:). He made the interface from a bunch of solenoids and a BASIC stamp. (www.parallax.com). He assigned each of the holes on it a number, and by using combinations of this, and second pauses, he was able to make it play marry had a little lamb! Pretty cool stuff.
  • It would be funny if somebody tricked an old church lady into playing this organ. She'd think the gates of hell were opening up!

    I never knew a pipe organ could be so bad-ass!!

    --cr@ckwhore
  • From the Jargon File [tuxedo.org]
    troll v.,n.

    1. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT. 2. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that the have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." 3. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.

    Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.


    Wait, doesn't this definition make you a Troll?
    Let's see here...
    You just posted a specious arguement, a flame and a personal attack on a message board for no reason but to annoy...
    Well Mr. AC, it looks like you're a troll too, but you're not one of the cool trolls (575, osm, Meept!!) and not even one of the average trolls like me.
    As you so eloquently put it, DIE TROLL DIE!!
    Oh, and one more thing - I did your mom last night.
    --Shoeboy
  • Hmmm, you are correct, an oversight on my part, but it has been years since I read it...

    However, there is also "Act II part III. Classic Walpurgis Night" with Homunculos and Erichto, Sphinxes and Nymphs, Ants (of the colossal kind), Chiron, Seismos and Manto, Pygmies, Pygmy-Elders and the Cranes of Ibycus. Surely this is a demonic guest list?

    :)Fudboy

    I guess I'm just a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta...
  • Yeah, he was actually a baroque composer, actually one of the first.

    Um, no. Although Bach's music bears much more resemblance to what's usually thought of as "Baroque art" than his predecessors' (one might point to Nietzsche's thesis regarding the perpetual delay between music and other art forms), he was certainly not one of the first composers of the period. The first important Baroque composer preceded Bach by more than an entire century, in fact: Claudio Monteverde lived from 1567 to 1643. And, as opposed to the Protestant polyphony of Bach's work, Monteverde composed nothing but vocal music, and took homophony to its limits, both in strongly Catholic sacred music and in profane pieces.

    even if now his pieces seem somewhat simplistic in their patterns

    There's nothing simplistic in the Art of the Fugue. Just listen to the Ricercare (or better yet, play it yourself; the full extent of its grandeur can't be comprehended if not by reading the piece. It's abstract music, like that of Beethoven's last works.)

    But back then, this was the new thing. It was rebel territory. "Wow! Tonality!"

    You have your history backwards. The tonal system was established in the late sixteenth century; all production since then (and, indeed, until Schoenberg methodised atonality with dodecaphony) was tonal. (What Bach did create was equal temperament - admittedly a great innovation, at least for instrumentists, although even Wendy Carlos has re-recorded the classic Switched-On Bach in uneven temperament - and what later came to be called the Bach-Rameau tonal system.)

    When I mentioned classical music, I was including baroque composers in that category as well, even if they're a bit too early. For the purposes of this article, the same thing applies to Bach as it does to all other composers for the organ. Whatever.

    My point was that neither Bach nor Mozart nor Beethoven nor Mahler thought of their music as "classical" at the time; it was simply contemporary music. The distinction between the "popular" or "contemporary" and the "classical" only came into being recently, with the rise of much simpler and shorter forms: jazz, blues, rock, whatnot, which differ significantly from the much more complex "classical music". (And although the relative number of musicians proficient in this style has never really suffered from a significant drop, it evidently hasn't been able to accompany the growth of the populational explosion of the 20th century; therefore, most music done today is the much "trendier" "popular music".)

  • Unless you have credible sources, I think you're making this up. I believe that our history books are making up a bunch of shit, but I also think that you're full of shit.

    Think that was flamebait? You've obviously never met me in person...
  • You are correct if you work on the assumption that your parents and grand parents can have an objective view of the subject.

    Why are we arguing about this unrelated topic anyways these propane fueled cannons are cool!! [8)=

  • Berlin (Reuters)
    Residents of Embassy Row were awakened 4:00 am Thursday morning by a series of loud explosions. Awakened sleepers who ventured outside discovered the source of the noise: an oversized set of pipes installed in front of the Dutch Embassy called the "Large Hot Pipe Organ," or LHPO.
    The Organ, which emits propane-fueled explosions was being installed for a Friday concert at the Dutch Embassy. However it was not scheduled to play until the following evening.

    "The odd thing was," said Frederich Tunalu, a caretaker employed by the Embassy, "there was no one at the controls! The thing just started playing all by itself!"

    Further investigation revealed that the machine was being controlled from a very tiny keyboard, played by an overweight mouse with ears growing out of its butt.

  • Wow!

    Okay, okay, I surrender. I bow to your superior music knowledge. I post without the +1 to humble myself before thee.


  • Yeah, but this is cool enough that they can require an espresso machine be supplied to them just to show it off:

    3.5.15 Espresso machine
    One medium capacity espresso machine, and an unlimited supply of espresso beans

  • Assuming that you're the same Anonymous Coward that posted the first one (it's hard to tell when the person you're speaking to doesn't want people to know who s/he/it is), hehe, funny how my domain is demon. I like speaking to trolls. They've got as much time on their hands as I do...
  • Remember: Guns don't kill people: apes kill people.
    -Charlton Heston

    I will rise from the ashes like a Tuscon!
  • It's a pity they didn't give much details on this instrument's tessiture (don't know the right word in English but it should be something meaning "Number of octaves that could be reached") and also max tempo.
    The samples I heard in MP3 didn't really demonstrate a "quick" and versatile instrument, that's why I wonder whether this is more a technical curiosity or a real musical instrument.
    --
  • I wanna hear "Tom Sawyer" on this bad boy.sweet.
  • Well, what you're actually hearing are harmonics of the subsonic fundamentals. I emailed with one of these guys a while back; he said that they played it on a barge in Amsterdam (I think) and that down inside the barge you could hear the most amazing pure tones at various harmonic steps. Did you do the lofi stream or the full 128 kbps? B/c you can hear a lot more at the hifi setting.
  • If you're interested in learning more about the topic, a good place to start are the Classical Music Pages [rz-berlin.mpg.de], light reading with the "layman" in mind. You can even try your hand at composition: here [wannalearn.com] is a rather complete list of introductory sites on the topic.

  • It happens that just Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon the sound artist Trimpin demonstrated a fire organ [sound.nf.ca] in St. John's Newfoundland as part of Sound Symposium 2000 [sound.nf.ca].

    I was quite fascinated by it. It had a really mysterious, ethereal sound.

  • I want to hear Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time", or "Get Organ-ized" on this...

    Wonder if Mr. Sholtz reads /. ....
  • This thing didn't happen yesterday. Yes, they launched their first satellite the other day. But at my first scan nobody here has a clue. I've followed Sirius and XMSR for about a year. Both are real. It's all about receivers in cars, not deskjockeys like you and your MP3s that yearn to be free. It's about driving for 15 hours and having your favorite radio format whether you're in Billings Montana or BooFoo Florida. otoh, this reactionary space is entertaining, if not informative. ....M
  • My vote would go to "The Hut on Fowl's Legs" from Mussorgsky's "Pictures At an Exhibition".

    Man, I love that section! Long time ago, I fell in love with "Pictures", in all versions. Even built up a MIDI rig, primarlily to play with the piece. (Obsessive, me? Naaaahhh!)
    The thing I like about Baba Yaga's hut is the sheer ability to go crazy with it. In my collection, I have both the Emerson, Lake and Palmer versions, as well as Tomita's.
    The LHPO would be excellent for the opening bars of "Hut", and used judiciously, might be good in "The Great Gate of Kiev".
    Other possibilities:
    The concerto for piano and percussion by Alberto Ginasterna.(spelling?)
    Beethovan's 9th symphony, particularly the scherzo.:)
  • The big booms frighten me :). My subwoofer was going nuts!

  • After the tour when this thing is permanently installed somewhere they ought to hook the MIDI up to a Web form so we could play it over the net. And then maybe a live feed so you could actually hear the effects. I'd pay fer that.
  • ... also useful for small short-range artillery strikes! Simply insert shells into pipes and play!

    -----------
  • The opera Mephistopheles (sp?), by I-forget-whom. In the prologue, the people say their lines, the devil does his thing, the angels say stupid stuff like "we are the angels that flit about that flit about that flit about we are the angels that..." ad nauseum, to throw some latin into this already academic mix. Everyone goes into a big medley, and you kind of forget about the devil who is absent from this part... until he tears onstage screaming "FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTT TTTTT!!!!!" That part right there has the organ already going full blast with the theme phrase... imagine that with an explosive organ!

    Yes, music is full of pieces that could be imporved dramatically merely by the addition of a few explosives.

    Funny, that seems to apply to most of life too :-)


  • Plug and Play compatible? Maybe we can get it windoze certified....
  • This confirms my belief that analog has a warmer sound than digital ;)
  • Would we really want a Microsoft OS targeting ballistic strikes for us? BSOD on the firing sequence, and we'd end up shelling some local retirement home!

    -----------
  • I am impressed, there were 20,000 hits to the site since it got mentioned on slashdot. Unfortunately LHPO is currently in 668 peices (not counting nuts and bolts), packed into a 6 meter ISO shipping container, sitting in Berlin. Its ready to travel on that tour, if someone wants to promote it. BTW: One of the builders of LHPO is one third of a Scrapheap Challenge ("Junkyard Wars" when show in the US) team, The NERDS [the-nerds.org]. While we are under NDA about what we built/how we did, lets say american honor will have nothing to complain about...
  • A couple of things:
    • Ol' J. S. Bach was a late Baroque composer (1685-1750), not Renaissance (~1400-1500).
    • In those days, there was no classical music. Bach composed contemporary music... for his day. (Heck, a lot of people think he was avant-garde even then... although the next generation was already obsessed with the Rococo and left J. S.'s Baroque heritage behind... none more so than his son C. P. E.) So, if Bach had a MIDI-fied Large Hot Pipe Organ... he would have probably written "Art of the MIDI-fied Fugue", that's all. ;)

  • Credible sources?
    ZikZak has INCREDIBLE sources. He gets his info is direct from the mouth of God. He's wrong about the American Civil War though, the war fought between Lincoln and the Confederate States was the Spanish Civil War.
    It's an easy mistake. God was up late last night drinking warm Pabst.
    --Shoeboy
  • Yikes, was I really that far off? I thougth I knew a little bit more than _that_ about classical music.

    Yeah, he was actually a baroque composer, actually one of the first. And yes, he was very advanced compared to the guys before him -- even if now his pieces seem somewhat simplistic in their patterns. But back then, this was the new thing. It was rebel territory. "Wow! Tonality!"

    When I mentioned classical music, I was including baroque composers in that category as well, even if they're a bit too early. For the purposes of this article, the same thing applies to Bach as it does to all other composers for the organ. Whatever.

  • Oh dear. Now see what you've done, you've gone and kicked my Evil Connective Thought Processes(tm) into gear...

    Is it a PC case? Is it a bomb shelter? It's both! Introducing the new Safe Mode Saferoom 9000 from Blammo(tm)! The only bomb shelter that comes preinstalled with emergency radio, one year's worth of freeze-dried food and drinking water, and the Linux distribution of your choice! a custom configured firewall array AND four feet of solid rebar-reinforced concrete over a two-inch layer of solid steel will protect you and your family from Back Orifice attacks, Ping_Of_Death, and that pesky fallout! BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! If you order now, you'll receive, at no extra charge, a free combination Tomato Musher and Turnip Twaddler! Order yours today!
  • This organ also remindeds me of that experiment in high school physical science, where you take a screen and a glass tube, attach the screen 1/3 of the way through the pipe, and heat over a burner to produce an eerie howling sound. Presumably, tubes of different dimensions and material will produce different tones and timbres. I very much wanted to make an organ of this type, using the heating elements from toasters or coffee pots, and with ceramic stoppers, but this was around the time when I got my first computer, and I quickly forgot all about it- 'till now!

    I always figured the contraption would look something like UNIVAC must've, and it would probably take the same size cooling system as an office building...

    :)Fudboy

    I guess I'm just a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta...
  • Well, I'll ignore my charming (but consistently wrong) colleague who also responded to this and simply state that I am NOT making any of this up.

    Those of us who were priviledged enough to be raised in the true South have been tought the truth by our parents and grandparents.

    You call me a liar, but fail to provide any proof to back up that insult. This is just the sort of response I would expect from some damn Northern Yankee!

  • Well, the unfortunate side effect of all this erudition is that all too often I sound like a pompous git... that's the price you pay :)

  • Actually, I've seen something similar done but only for a different purpose. Near where I'm originally from, there's a large anhydrous amonia dump. They used to have a problem with birds crappings all over the tanks and facilities, so they installed a motion activated propane noise gun to scare the bejesus out of any bird that ventures by. The system is actually quite effective, and quite loud: you can hear a soft thud from several miles away. Still, that's just one little piece of drill stem... I'd love to hear/feel/see one of these babies played.

    ----
  • ...that Lincoln fathered slave children, from US News & World Report [usnews.com]
  • Oooooh. Good pick - it's my favourite from The Planets, which is admittedly uneven - but I think the following are also contenders:
    • Bruckner's Symphony no. 5. Almost Baroque in pomp; an architectural masterpiece.
    • Berlioz's Requiem. The work because of which he became known for writing for 500 performers.
    • Mahler's Symphony no. 8. Written for an orchestra of 150 performers, two choirs and organ. Mahler was the ultimate musical megalomaniac. Fits perfectly.
  • LOL, sweet troll, shoeboy. look how many responses!!! And yet through all the sarcasm, you even have a point about the all the shameless imperialistic land grabbing of the past 200 years... to bad most of these people are so thick...
  • IIRC, the Wagner museum is in Bayreuth, where the Ring opera cycle is shown.
  • Looking at your sig... are you on the FUD Patrol? :-)

    --Joe
    --
  • It's a riff on "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco. You should read it. It gave me a whole new outlook (or lookout) on the nut jobs.
  • Tympani??!! Bwah - go for the really giant bass drum. Actually, in our marching band at school, we had a big pirate ship that shot nerf(tm) balls out of cannons with compressed air. They weren't very loud, though.

    "Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"

  • haha sorry for the offtopic post but... that line 'Father DJ Busta Nutt' had me paralyzed on my bed laughing so hard... could anyone imagine someone SAYING that during church service? ahhahahaha...
  • by carlos_benj ( 140796 ) on Saturday July 08, 2000 @04:06PM (#948527) Journal
    This has nothing to do with those nutty "gun-lovin americans"

    I like those guys better than those gutty "nun-lovin americans"!

    Every year the Wichita (Kansas) Symphony does an outdoor concert at the conclusion of the 'River Festival' that includes the 1812 Overture. A battery of cannons is supplied by a Fort Riley artillery crew. Very impressive.

  • Bullshit. That was Jefferson.

    --

  • OK, so Lincoln was born in Spain. I can deal with that, but he didn't grow up there right? Wasn't it Slovenia? Brdo Castle with Dad drinking medica and Mom plotting her revenge on the Rosicrucians.
  • One truly shudders when one thinks what the Crazy MIDI Man [aristotle.net] could do with this puppy. ;-)

    Apparently, he's still looking to share his free falling sky-diving life [aristotle.net] with just the right woman.

    Off topic or otherwise, this is a must-see site.

  • Is it just me, or did that suck? Ok, the hardware is cool and unique - I give credit to the inventor, but the puffy noises it makes caused me to think there was something wrong with my MP3 software. In the extreme, I suppose it can qualify as music, but it should be called something other than an organ(inspires souds from a concert hall). Now if this thing actually SOUNDED something SIMILAR to an organ, and was capable of playing extablished music in new fantisuful ways, now, that would be WAY cool.

    H.
  • Better spring for that asbestos case first, or else you'll be blotting up what's left of your system with a Handi-Wipe. :)
  • Is this thing related to the real cannons needed to do the 1812th correctly?
  • Well... now that's really blowing your horn!

    Oracle announces Net-Devices?! [cadfu.com]
  • I downloaded the MP3s since I am on a 26400 modem connection :). Damn, my Klipsch Promedia speakers were overworked [grin].

  • I'm thinking for some rebared concrete...... four metres thick at least...... of course, having a propane-powered explosion subwoofer would be MUCH better............ it's techno time!
  • Um...what's a real username?
  • Kinda puts Yamaha and Roland MIDI to shame.... :( Time to upgrade!
  • Okay, those pictures are almost surreal! I feel get this Fritz Lang Metropolis "people-eating machine" look-and-feel. That just looks scary!

    Seeing as it's explosive, does this thing give of a massive shockwave, or is the energy many directed vertically?
    Oracle announces $199 Linux Net-Boxes! [cadfu.com]
  • I'd have to agree. The concept is cool, but I can't tell the difference between the way that thing sounds, and, say, an oil refinery or any other area with large amounts of industrial noise. BFD.
  • I may be wrong (usually I am in some way) but I think the 1812 Overture's cannonade is a later addition by us gun lovin' USAians. The cannon fire can be any loud percussive. Ex: We used tympani in Orchestra when I was in college.
  • It would be fun to compare it to the other organ...
  • Sheesh, too much bass :). Although the music wasn't interesting or a keeper for me.

  • I don't know about you guys, but I am instantly reminded of Faust (Goethe) and the Walpurgisnacht Festival, towards the climax in the second book. This is truly one demonic instrument! For those of you with more contemporary (geeky) literary leanings, this is the same festival as takes place towards the end of the Illuminatus trilogy, dressed up as a sort of Euro-Woodstock.

    :)Fudboy

    I guess I'm just a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta...
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08, 2000 @02:34PM (#948546)
    About 15 years ago, I attended a very weird lecture sponsored by the "Visual Music Alliance" in Los Angeles. The presenter was a very eccentric UCLA professor who studied the history of "visual music." He traced the history back as far as the ancient Greeks, who had concerts accompanied by a "light organ" which had little candles behind colored pieces of glass with a shutter, to project colors on a screen. But the one thing of this lecture that most impressed me was his tales about the Flame Organ. Apparently, back in the 19th century, in the heyday of pipe organs, there were quite a few flame organs. These were usually made with transparent glass tubes, and flammable gasses would be fed into the tubes, ignited by a sparking electrode under the organist's control. Different gasses that burned in different colors would be used in different tubes, the effect was as much visual as musical, and the colors were said to be quite vivid. He says that Wagner was particularly enamored by the flame organ, and there is still one remaining vintage flame organ, Wagner's personal machine, in the Wagner museum (wherever the hell that is). Considering the long history of this device, I'm not impressed with the new "hot pipe organ." Stuff like this has been done before, and better, by groups like Survival Research Labs. Its just another huge emitter of greenhouse gasses.
  • by danakil ( 204167 ) on Saturday July 08, 2000 @02:36PM (#948547)
    A french artist has a site describing his own fire organ, you'll find some impressive pics there. He has several instruments (including drums) working this way. The site is :

    http://perso.club-internet.fr/orguafeu (there's an english version)

    And you'll find there a picture of the 1st fire organ, created in the 18th century !
  • Ok. The continent is North America, right? Named, sorta, after Amerigo Vespucci, right? Now, I live in the United States of America, but my brother lives in Canada and is a Canadian citizen. I am a citizen of the United States. We are both Americans because Amerigo Vespucci lent his name to the two continents, not everything between 54' 40'' and the Rio Grande.

    Also, Tchaikovsky died in 1893. The Spanish-American War was fought in 1898 (at least the Cuba part). Go figure.

  • Anonymous Coward, I hope you are listening.

    What you occultist oddballs don't seem to realise is your own bizarre hypocricy. Any mention of the supernatural that doesn't fit in with your own odd beliefs about what an ancient political/social tool (the bible to those who aren't paying attention) means in a modern context is taken as literally as your own thoughts about the good book.

    Understand society, understand people. Don't try and shoehorn poeple into your own theories. For fuck's sake. And please stop posting on Slashdot. No one cares.

  • What, no mention of Front Line Assembly, Pig, or KMFDM? Jeez.
  • What would be the best piece of classical music to play on this thing? I'm voting for Mars - The Bringer of War by Holst...
  • FUD Patrol...no where to go... ;)

    :)Fudboy

    I guess I'm just a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta...
  • Ah, Causabon. I, Belbo, will introduce you to my friend, my muse, Abulaifa.
  • Whether Lincoln had slaves or not has nothing to do with whether slavery caused the Civil War. All along, people in Washington disliked slavery, and they thought that if they could contain it to the states where it already existed, that would be an acceptable solution. However, when slavery expanded west into Missouri and Texas, people grew weary. And "Bleeding Kansas" just added to the problem. All the northern states abolished slavery, yet the southern ones continued to endorse it. John Brown tried to free the slaves, and was viewed as a hero in the north and a villain in the south. In fact, John Brown was the reason the southern states began building up military--they believed the north was trying to get the slaves to turn against them.

    All along it was about the slaves, not some bullshit taxation law. The north threatened the south's way of life, and so they tried to secede. They couldn't handle the fact that in democracy you don't always get your way, so they decided to run home crying and quit the whole thing.

  • The trolls are twisting the threads. That's what trolls are for. I stumbled across Eco's stuff when I was going through my Pirsig phase. I'm with you (him). Slashdot is starting to lose my interest - I seem more interested in having a go at some misguided religious nut than following the current tech trends. Maybe I should retreat to a hermitage and read some more or something. All this talk of IPv6 and possible water on Mars is starting to wear a little thin. Seems a bit off-topic if you know what I mean. Heh. Ah well....
  • hmmm, I guess I save the insightful and interesting posts for my straight acount...

    I think you need some schooling [tuxedo.org] on just what makes a troll a successful troll.

    Glad I could help.
  • This would certainly change my church service

    Oh, this would be a treat, wouldn't it? "And now, will the congregation please rise, as we hear a hymn by 'Father DJ Busta Nutt, the Techno Soundguru'." (Begin chorus of "Day by Day", with heavy bassline and strobelights bombarding the senses)

    Or maybe it just won't catch on. Personally, I'd start going to church again...

    /* TNW */
  • does it run Linux?


    <O
    ( \
    X

  • Okay.... now I'm getting scared... :)
  • Ummm. Hate to mention this, but your Wrongco Hedge-O-Matic at 4 feet thick wouldn't hold a candle to Weryk's 4 meter thick subwoofer. Unless a metre is smaller than a meter.
  • Amen or something secularly close to Amen. I suggest Karl Popper and Wittgenstein. Ah well... indeed.
  • I can't seem to find "Large, explosive, flaming pipe organ" on my Casio keyboard!

    Geoff
  • Except my belief that this is the most amazing thing I have ever seen (excluding that one girl that one time who did that one thing).
    I want this thing to go on tour and swing by the Seattle area.
    Maybe there is life after George Clinton and Bootsie Collins after all.
    In conclusion, DAMN!!!!!!
    --Shoeboy
  • If you have a real GS midi synth/module(no an sblive,awe32 wont do).
    You can take a look at
    http://www.scpop.de and
    http://www.lutheran-hymnal.com/organ/organhymn.h tm
    I say those midi files sounds very much like an real pipe organ.

    Say no to software patents in europe.
    http://petition.eurolinux.org
  • I met a sound guy called Erik Hobijn at DEAF95 (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival) in Rotterdam. He had done a show with a midi controlled organ of a similiar description and used it at a show in Berlin previously. Showed me some excellent photos. Can't see his name on the material surrounding the LHPO so I am not sure if he was involved in this one or had built one of his own, but if you're into pyro then I suggest you do a search for "Erik Hobijn" and fire on Google or similar. Check out his "Delusions of Self-Immolation" [www.ddh.nl] for starters... he's out there, a cool guy...

    But hey, I'm biased, I do fire festivals [beltane.org] and fire sculptures as well...

  • by fjordboy ( 169716 ) on Saturday July 08, 2000 @02:11PM (#948567) Homepage
    This would certainly change my church service.


  • I'm sorry, but you're wrong. While it's true that Lincoln was born in a log cabin, that was in Ostia, and besides, he was abducted at the age of 12 by aliens, who implanted him a brain controller chip, and used him as a puppet to carry on the war.
    And, the war was'nt against the sourthern states, that was only a diversion move while the real war was being fought in nepal, because the world's biggest mines of trollitium are there. About the naming, in light of the real facts, i think it would be best called "Mars attacks".
  • This would be the coolest backing for SRL since
    Einsturzende Neubauten backed a show.Fire,explosions,cannons,violent robots on a
    dinosaur scale.I wanna hear Tocatta et Fuga.
    http://www.srl.org/ [srl.org]

    A story on Mark Pauline would be warranted since he is an Uber-hardware geek and gave his
    thumb for the chaos he loves.
  • Actually, Bach would have loved it... P.D.Q. Bach, that is. :-)

    What they really should do is put a couple of famous pieces up there, like the Tocatta and Fugue... the famous one from Phantom of the Opera. If they had that sort of thing in the Rennaisance(sp?), it would have been enough to make composers drop classical music altogether.

  • I was in the Reserves and an Artillery gunner. Wait, I was in college and in the Army and I was allowed to fire a big old gun and I was in my twenties.
  • by CocoLapin ( 122750 ) on Saturday July 08, 2000 @02:40PM (#948572) Homepage
    IIRC, Tchaikovsky wrote the piece in honor of the Spanish-American war. or should that be War with a capital W?

    Well, you don't recall correctly. Actually Tchaikovsky composed it on a patriotic mood. He found inspiration in the defeat of Napoleon's army during the invasion of Russia. The russian campain happened in 1812 hence the name of the overture. This is also because of Tchaikovsky's source of inspiration that you can hear the russian's national anthem in the 1812 overture. This has nothing to do with those nutty "gun-lovin americans" :-)
  • IIRC, Tchaikovsky wrote the piece in honor of the Spanish-American war
    YDRC. The Spanish-American war was not fought in 1812, it was fought in 1764 between the Brits and American colonists on one side and the French and their Native American allies on the other.
    The war fought in 1812 was the American Civil War which was fough to stop the fiendish expansionism of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm. This is not to be confused with "The war of 1812" which was fought in the 1950's against the North Koreans and Chinese.
    Read some fucking history.
    --Shoeboy
  • Do you have no sense of double entendre? Come on man, lighten up. If my organ was propane powered I'd be a happy man... In fact if my organ was a large hot pipe I'd... errr. Oh for Christ's sake man. It's a beautifully filthy post.

    I remember my days at Oxford. The dean would come in of a morning and make us wipe his organ down....

  • It was really awesome when I saw it tattooed.on.your.moms.cuntlips.com [rotten.com]

  • you mentioned that: "Different gasses that burned in different colors would be used in different tubes, the effect was as much visual as musical, and the colors were said to be quite vivid." do you have any information on what type of gasses? i thought the only 2 colors you could get from burning gas hydrocarbons was blue(stoichiometricly ballanced-plenty of oaxygen) and orange/yellow(O2 starved burn) from the resultant tiny incandescent carbon chunks. did they mix in noble gasses with low ionization energies ....maybe?
  • Remember, a troll is not perfect until someone uses their real username... ;)
  • Thanks! I never expected this conversation under this topic. How refreshing (even if you do come across like a 'pompous git'). I enjoy "classical" music but must confess an abyssmal lack of knowledge about it. Although I have always thought that "If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it."

    My favorites are Bach, Beethoven and Copeland, the three B's of the..... Oh, no, wait.....

  • What Bach did create was equal temperament - admittedly a great innovation, at least for instrumentists

    Actually Bach's tuning system was based on Andreas Werckmeister's, who came up with a mathematical well-tempered (although not true even-tempered) scale in the year that Bach was born.
    Bach didn't write for an even-tempered tonal system.
    Bach's tonal system was designed to keep the 3rds in 5ths in near perfect intonation in the tonic and closely related keys. Even temperament means every key is equally out of tune-- and the 3rds and 5ths are just a little bit flat, something Bach would have shuddered at.
    Today we've all gotten used to hearing slightly flat "perfect" intervals though.
  • the 3rds and 5ths are just a little bit flat, something Bach would have shuddered at

    Not quite. The equally-tempered 12-tone "major third" is just a trifle sharp (ratio = 1.2599+, vs. a platonic ratio of 1.25). The 12-tone "perfect fifth" is, by contrast, a trifle flat (ratio 1.4983+, vs. a platonic ratio of 1.5) Helmholz (1890 -- yes, the physicist) describes the 12-tone third as "bright and metallic", and I like that terminology.

    As to whether Bach would have shuddered at the sound, I dunno. Helmholz, like many modern Western musicologists, was a bit of a snob about temperament in general. The pure temperament is what comes "naturally" from a vocalist or a performer on an unfretted instrument, and the resonance of the chords is stunning. On the other hand, equally tempered scales have a unique and interesting sound of their own.

    Besides, for pure dissonance, the 12-tone scale is unmatched: the augmented fourth/diminished fifth, at the square root of two (1.41421+) is truly wonderful. For many years, it was used by American (US + Canada; I don't know about Mexico, but I assume so, since we use the same rail stock...) freight train klaxons, precisely because it is so hair-raising.
  • They've got the cannon-symphony 1812 Overture duet going here in San Antonio too, every New Year's at Ft. Sam Houston.

    Heh, I'd bet all the good forts do it

There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"

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