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Linux PCs Drive 74-Channel Pipe Organ 265

Posted by simoniker from the not-smoking-one dept.
cyberman11 writes "According to the EE Times, Marshall & Ogletree LLC have created an electronic simulation of a classic Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ in the Trinity Church situated, just 600 feet from ground zero near the World Trade Center site in New York. The system consists of 10 Linux PCs that drive 74 Carver amplifiers and 74 Definitive Technology speakers, for a total of 15,000 watts."
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Linux PCs Drive 74-Channel Pipe Organ More

Linux PCs Drive 74-Channel Pipe Organ

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  • 21st century meets 15th century (Score:5, Interesting)

    by downix ( 84795 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @07:56PM (#7624148) Homepage
    The scary part here is the pure mathematics found on both ends of the spectrum. A classic pipe organ is a mathematical marvel, much like the computer of today. (I did a paper once on the mathematics of musical instruments, more focused on the Violin, but I made note of the pipe organ as well)

    The elegance and simplicity of such ancient instruments from the "Enlightenment" period cover up the true genius it took to design and develop them.
    • It didn't go into much detail as to how they were actually simulating the organs:

      Sorting out which transients contributed to a qualitative sense of realness-- to a master organist -- was a job that only an experienced player could hope to achieve. Late nights and many samples led to a collection of proprietary techniques for combing the transients out of a recording and ordering them for reproduction.

      So I think they just stuck to the attack/hold/release model and used extensive and clever sampling. A prop

      • Re:But did they use mathematical models? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:23PM (#7624336)
        "A proper mathematical model would probably have require too much processing power even with 10 PCs, Linux or not."

        Very true...I can say for sure that to model even a single resonator on 10 pc's in realtime, you would have to make some drastic mathmatical simplifications and you would probably miss many sounds that an musician would notice. If you don't make those simplifications and try to model the physics exatly with complex geometires and all the nonlinear effects, it is impossible to do it in realtime and you are back to using recorded samples, only now the authenticity of your model is still in question.
      • processing power

        Good idea, lets do a power breakdown:

        The system consists of 10 Linux PCs that drive 74 Carver amplifiers and 74 Definitive Technology speakers, for a total of 15,000 watts

        74 Speakers: 1800 watts
        74 Amplifiers: 1100 watts
        10 CPU's: 12,100 watts

        -

  • I can see the advertising slogan now... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @07:56PM (#7624150)
    Linux: Perfect for playing with your organ

  • hrm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by xao gypsie ( 641755 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @07:58PM (#7624165)
    reminds me of my friend who wanted to put a fork in a blender. he did this by connecting the blender to a serial cable wired to the various speeds, and then wrote a simple linux driver to control it. had his sister ssh into his box while he wasnt in the room, and boom.....buh bye to the fork. i would post a picture of the setup on my webserver, but at the offchange it gets /.ed, i will refrain. i dont think my roommates would like me killing their internet, and it would be hard to explain...

    xao

  • Cryptonomicon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Evil Pete ( 73279 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @07:58PM (#7624166) Homepage

    The first thing I thought when I saw the item was of the organ/computer in Cryptonomicon. Aside from that a very creative mix of old and new tech.

  • guess they... (Score:5, Funny)

    by 0x12d3 ( 623370 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:01PM (#7624183)
    Didn't like the BSD logo

  • Aaahh.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr2cents ( 323101 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:03PM (#7624203)
    Is this thing on sourceforge yet? freshmeat? Or is it just a scheme to lur geeks to church?

  • Check this out (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:05PM (#7624212)
    24/7 streaming organ music [organlive.com]. The internet truly has something for everbody.

  • Is it the same as the real thing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MagicDude ( 727944 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:06PM (#7624214)
    Quite impressive yes, but there are just some things that can't be accurately recreated by technology, and musical instruments as grand as this are some of them. You can recreate the sound of a single pipe yes, but you can't recreate the ambiance and neuance that comes from having an entire pipe system in place. Pipes can resonate when similar notes in different octives are played, which adds different timbres and depth to the sound. Also, now that there aren't vast cavities in the well where the pipes used to be, or the wall cavities are filled differently, the sound will bounce around differently and give a different sound than what was originally thre. This is something that a computer can't really recreate or compensate for, as even humans don't quite understand how sound works all the time (Look at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Troy NY, engineers and architects are still doing tests to see why a 150 year old music hall got some of the best acoustics in the world entirely by accident.) It's a great marvel, but it's not the same.
    • You make the common mistake of assuming that "can't yet" is the same as "can't".
    • Thing is, what you're bringing up isn't about digital replacement -- it's about any replacement. Even if they build another pipe organ as closely as they can to the original, it won't "accurately recreate" the sound of the original.

      It would be interesting to hear the opinions of people who have actually heard it and have better hearing than me 8^)
    • Reading the article, I got the impression that they weren't trying to exactly reproduce an entire pipe organ, but to provide an interim solution until the original organ can be repaired or replaced.

      I would expect that the range of voices and tonal quality (not to mention cost) of the Epiphany far exceeds what can be achieved with even the best MIDI keyboards or even simulated pipe organs such as these [rodgersinstruments.com].

      Nonetheless, you must have admiration for the engineers who developed this organ. It's truly a marvelous
    • We'd all like to think that the human ear is the epitome of listening devices in the world. Unfortunatly, at least biologically speaking, it is mediocre at best. Through thousands of years of trial and error we have managed to maximize our auditory system's capabilities, but when you get down to it, most people can't distinguish 440Hz from 441Hz, 9dB from 10dB, 120BPM from 121BPM, C# from D, violin from a viola, or the beatles from the monkeys.

      Perhaps that last one is a stretch. But still, most people's
      • If it were possible to do a blind A/B test between the two organs, I would wager more than half of a general population sample, even more if you only used musicians, could Identify which was the Real pipe organ and which was the Linux clone, even if the room was full of wheezing seniors.

        This organ is nothing more than a (rather sophisticated) sample playback device with some rather nifty logic to choose it's samples well. This is the very reason it does an incomplete job of reproducting an actual organ
        • I have to disagree that a soprano singing on stage sounds VERY different from a recording of that soprano being played in a speaker in the same spot. A bass drum and a gong sound VERY different. At best a live singer versus a recording of the same singer sound subtly different.

          Having heard neither the original pipe organ, nor the new one, I wouldn't care to wager on such a contest. However, you should consider that the general public thought milli vanilli actually sang their songs.

          Given that the entir

  • Oh man, not again (Score:5, Interesting)

    by faust2097 ( 137829 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:06PM (#7624220)
    Hey guys, guess what?

    Wattage has no direct bearing on the loudness or audio quality of a system!

    Now I'm sure that this is a pretty boomin' artificial pipe organ these guys have built but this focus on wattage in consumer electronics must stop. It's like saying that the car engine that uses the most gas or revs at the highest speed is the most powerful while ignoring all other relevan statistics.

    I hope you guys enjoy your eleventy-billion watt multimedia systems with 1% THD.
    • Yes, but this one goes to eleven.

    • Re:Oh man, not again (Score:2, Informative)

      by fintler ( 140604 )
      1% is if you're lucky

      the new sony dream system and the new panasonic system both have 10% of THD. but they're 600watts tho so people will still buy them.

      THD, along with wattage are still only small factors in the sound a speaker puts out. materials used to make the cone, sensitivity, and resistance influence the sound enough so that your ear can actually tell the difference.

      This is pretty much why bose doesn't publish the specs for their speakers. they have great marketing, but their speakers are CRAP. M
      • Any good links for a budding audiophile to read up on this stuff? Especailly what is THD, the best cone material, etc.
      • *shudder* Bose. Those guys should get some kind of marketing award. How to sell total crap for insane prices and make people think they're getting a good deal. Those WaveRadio things they make - a clock radio with a CD player. You can get them from Radio Shack for $50. The Bose ones cost like $400 or something insane. I've heard them a lot (I travel on business and most of the hotels I stay in have them) and they sound truly dire. Thin, muffled, no image whatsoever - exactly what you'd expect from a clock r
    • Yes, I was going to ask if that was 15,000 watts peak RMS,
      or peak 15,000 watts Bruce Perens.
    • 15,000 watts sounds like a lot, I know (OK, it is a lot), but have you ever been close to a large pipe organ? They are *loud*! I truly doubt that 15,000 watts divided over 74 channels is excessive for the task. To do the job, they needed to not only reproduce the sound of the organ as closely as possible, but also reproduce the volume.
    • I agree in spirit, but I defy you to make a quiet 15000W system. I bet you can't even burn all that power on a resistor quietly!
    • Reminds me of a usenet post:

      "Remeber, watts = volts X amps. Unless you are in the amplifier business, in which case it always ends up being 200 watts or more no matter what"

    • Yes it does (Score:4, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @11:05PM (#7625282)
      The more wattage you feed into a given system, the louder it will play, until you reach teh speaker limits. If I feed 1 watt into each of my speakers, I get a nice normal listening level. If I feed 150 watts into each speaker (the limit of my amp) I'd blow my eardrums in short order.

      Now, there are other factors that matter in loudness. The next one after wattage would be efficency. Given a watt of input, what kind of output does a speaker give? Obviously, the more efficient the speaker, the louder a system will be at a given wattage. I don't know how efficient most consumer speakers are, they don't usually list the stats. Good high end speakers (pro/audiophile) tend to be in the 88-90dB/watt @ 1 metre. A stage speaker can be in the 100-109dB range, maybe even higher though I've never heard of one.

      Well then the @ 1 metre spec brings us to another component: distance of the listener. Loudness depends on proximity to the source of the sound. Thus a person sitting next to a speaker will hear a much different level than one across the room.

      The room, yeat another problem. In an environment with no reflections, sound will decay much faster than an environment with lots of them. So depending on the kind of hall you are in. In a very dead hall, people in the back will hear much less sound in the front. In a properly designed hall, they'll still hear plenty.

      Of course it doesn't end here, it depends on lots of other things like frequency range, which drivers are being used how much and so on.

      Point is there are too many vairables to try and give a final number as to how loud something will be. None the less it IS desirable to have SOME kind of indication. Well wattage is a good one. Not a great one, not a final and all consuming one, but a good one. If I have a 1000 watt system, I can say with some confidence it is going to be pretty loud. IF I have a 10 watt system I can say with some confidence it will not be nearly as loud. I can't caluclate an absolute difference, but I can get a general feel, with one number. If you want a better loudness stat, the best you can reasonably do is a wattage stat and a sensitivity stat. Past that, it all comes down to specifically what you are using it for.

      As a side note, 1% THD is quite acceptable for speakers, and you'd not notice it unless you knew what to listen for, and even then probably only on a sinewave test. My high end speakers (cost over $2000/pair) produce 1%THD (or even more) at high volume levels.

      Which, of course, is another consideration, since you're being pickey about stats. THD at what volume level? Speakers' THD increases with volume. Also within what frequency range? A speak setup may have good THD over most of its range, but under or over a certian point it may increase quite a bit.

      Stats aren't perfect. Deal with it.

  • not a "pipe organ" (Score:5, Informative)

    by CoughDropAddict ( 40792 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:08PM (#7624233) Homepage
    Hate to point out the obvious, but without pipes it's not a pipe organ. In organ circles, these are known as "electronic" organs (crazy jargon, I know).

    Looks like an interesting project though. Electronic organs have never sounded remotely as good as the real thing (and they've been making them since the 60s at least). For all the thought and work they've put into this, I wonder if it will sound significantly better.
    • Yeah, what a radical thought, like, a pipe organ should actually have pipes. Thing is, though, this really is a pipe organ, because in linux you can actually create your own pipes [die.net].
    • Yes, but your thoughts on electronic organs never sounding as good as the "real thing" is just a personal opinion.....

      A number of the electronic organs used in 60's and 70's rock music are considered "modern classics" today, and had their own unique sounds that many people really like.

      I'd agree that the boomy, room-filling sound of a pipe organ is something that would be very tough to reproduce perfectly accurately with nothing but electronics -- but I think a pretty good approximation can be done. Pipe
      • A number of the electronic organs used in 60's and 70's rock music are considered "modern classics" today, and had their own unique sounds that many people really like.

        I was speaking to electronic organs that are trying to imitate pipe organs. Rock organs are to pipe organs as an electric guitar is to a lute. The former are new instruments that spring from the evolution of an instrument family.

        I'd agree that the boomy, room-filling sound of a pipe organ is something that would be very tough to reprodu
        • It works the other way round as well. The church where I play is a small rural Catholic parish, and even the smallest pipe organ, voiced down, would overpower the space.

          So we have a sampled electronic instrument - not a toaster, it's a classical electronic instrument (with a full RCO [GB equivalent of AGO]) pedalboard, and a reasonable selection of classical stops. I don't need it to go particularly loud, because my average turnout is about 50. As I stated in an earlier reply, the loudspeakers move the ai
    • A professional music director/organist of my acquaintance played a large, wonderful, and somewhat elderly pipe organ at a local church. During the winter before it was finally renovated, the old organ was getting quite wheezy. They rented an electric organ for the season. He rather disparagingly referred to it as "the toaster". Seems that was a conventional term for the pipe-elitists to use. 8-)

  • 74 channels? Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eiki ( 713952 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:12PM (#7624252) Homepage
    The article raised more questions than it answered, for me. The part I don't understand is why so many channels are necessary - any loudspeaker will produce polyphony (when cell phones claim to have polyphonic ring tones, it has more to do with the tone generation circuit or software than with the speaker). Maybe someone who knows more about acoustics than I do can answer this one: what is meant by a "massive amount of polyphony"? More frequency content in the spectrum? And are the 74 Epiphany channels matched to 74 original pipes? Does each speaker play only one tone?

    Finally, does this also mean that recordings of organ music are poor substitutes for the real thing, since they will be played only on stereo speakers, which are presumably capable of "less" polyphony? I am sure that many organ zeolots have been saying all along that there is no substitute for live performance ... but c'mon, my Helmut Walcha CD's don't sound THAT bad, do they?

    • Re:74 channels? Why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by wmguy ( 724524 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:17PM (#7624301)
      If you've seen a large pipe organ they can consist of thousands of pipes spread over a rather large area. The acoustic effect of having different tones coming from totally different areas of an auditorium is completely different than placing a hundred speakers throughout and having every one of them replicating the same sound.

      There's more to it than that...but that's all I feel qualified to bring up.

      • Re:74 channels? Why? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You also have to take into account that certain stops cover certain frequencies. Therefore your Piccolo on the Upper is not going to be coming out of the same speaker as the Tuba on the Swell, it would sound terrible.

        I'd also wager that some channels are specifically for bass. Organs put out a lot of bass - most of it will also be felt rather than heard. That also goes some way to reproducing an organ sound live.

        Ultimately, live sound is a totally different kettle of fish from recorded sound. That's why B

  • Unplayed by Human Hands (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TerryAtWork ( 598364 ) <research@aceretail.com> on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:17PM (#7624293)
    is the title of an circa 1970 album recorded at the Jet Propulsion Center with a church organ driven by a computer.

    I have been trying to find it ever since.

    Does ANYONE have a clue where to look?

    • Cover art [showandtellmusic.com].

      A Google search shows that the album was reviewed by Computer Music Journal (Fall '77). It seems to have been the work of Prentiss Knowlton, who is cited in a different online source for connecting an electronic organ keyboard to a PDP-8 computer. There are some other references to Prentiss Knowlton on Google that might help you track him down.
    • Not quite the same, but if you take certain HP scanners, set them to SCSI channel 0, then hold the scan button when turning them on, they play "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"

  • pales (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 602 ( 652745 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:17PM (#7624294)
    I ain't heard it, but my guess is that the sound from this device pales in comparison to a good pipe organ. It ain't about power, it's about a very complex sound waveform that may or may not be reproducible. Go listen to a top-notch organ [efn.org] sometime, then tell me whether you'd be interested in hearing a digital simulation. (I don't mean to be disparaging to these guys, though--they're welcome to try.)

  • Gotta get me one of these (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:18PM (#7624307)
    put it in a car and when the kid next to me decides he has to have his ghetto rap turned all the way up for the benefit and enjoyment of everyone in the general area . . .

    * B O O M *

    Ride of the Valkyries

    heh heh heh

    • Re:Gotta get me one of these (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have a highly paid friend who does just that. He got fed up of driving around, having to listen to other people's crap, soo...

      Smarmy boy-racer type with the baseball cap on cruises up alongside us at the lights in his Ford Escort with the (now obligatory) blue light underneath, aircraft wing glued on the back, tiny blonde in the passenger seat, and 50 Cent hammering away on the stereo... ...so we just turn Elgar up a bit.

      Last time we did that the other guy stalled.

    • Better yet, the 1812 overture. Just don't forget to put in earplugs for the cannon solo! <eg>

    • Man, I tried putting that tune into my head, and you know what got stuck in there instead?

      Theme to Star Wars.

      I gotta get out some more.

  • If you want something similar to run on your PC... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:21PM (#7624325)
    check out http://www.hauptwerk.co.uk/ [hauptwerk.co.uk] some of the larger organs (sampled pipe-by-pipe) require up to 1.5GB of ram to work and sound really good (check the site for samples esp. the ones of the commercial organ vendors).

  • Obligatory SCO comment (Score:3, Funny)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <giles@jones.zen@co@uk> on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:24PM (#7624340)
    SCO will tell them to change their tune if they complain about license fees :)

  • Obligatory SCO reference (Score:3, Funny)

    by fiannaFailMan ( 702447 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:38PM (#7624437) Journal
    The system consists of 10 Linux PCs
    That'll be $6,990 then sir.

  • a new level of ear-fucking... (Score:5, Funny)

    by painehope ( 580569 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:42PM (#7624466)
    Let's see - I have 3 linux machines, one Irix, an O2 that I'm about to slap NetBSD on, 3 ( currently unused ) old RS6K workstations, plenty of old speakers ( might need a few more heavy hitters ), and a serious dislike of the rap bullshit my neighbors across the street play.
    All what I need to do now is brew some napalm ( easy ), crank up the Wagner, put on some combat boots and a silly hat, and turn their front yard into a beachhead.

    For those who don't get it, see Apocalypse Now.

  • Things to ponder (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @08:48PM (#7624502)
    Since it has speakers rather than pipes, if you had a lot of them, would you have a Beowoofer cluster?
  • I'm not impressed. I'd be really impressed if they did something really cool like build a modern pyrophone (a/k/a Flame Organ).

    http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/16/162.html
    http ://www.deadmedia.org/notes/16/162-comment.html

    Fuck this fake digital shit, sometimes analog is way cooler, especially when it involves exploding large amounts of flammable gases.

  • On pipe organs... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Raetsel ( 34442 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @09:09PM (#7624639)

    I'm noticing a fair amount of discussion here regarding "...why 74 amps/speakers?" As someone who has worked on pipe organs, here's what I am assuming:
    • They have one for each stop (or subset of stops) on the original organ.
    What is this "stop" I refer to? It's a collection of pipes with a specific sound... Vox Humana, Trumpet, etc., that the organist can choose and (in some cases) assign to a specific keyboard. An organ the size of the Trinity Church Aeolian-Skinner would have had dozens of stops. Even a small pipe organ has quite a few -- more than 10 is quite common.

    Each stop has a default keyboard with a specific name, related to which wind chest the pipes are located on ("Great", "Swell", "Choir"... though those are just starting points).

    Along with the location of these pipes on certain wind chests comes other factors... only the set of pipes on a chest called 'swell' can have their volume controlled -- usually by way of a set of shutters that open and close. The rest of the organ pipes play at the same volume all. the. time.

    Another thing about pipe organs... some of them (I don't know about this specific one) run on very high pressure. Normal for the pipe organs I worked on was 8 to 10 inches of water. I heard one that ran at 80 inches of water, and the 'attack' of the sound was like a gunshot. I have yet to hear a speaker that can duplicate that sound.

    • I gotta do it: Why did Bach... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Onan The Librarian ( 126666 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @09:19PM (#7624702)
      have so many children ?

      Because his organ had no stops...

      (Btw, thanks for the technical info !)
    • 1 PSI ~= 27.6799048 inches of water ~= 6.8947573 kPa

      80 inches of water ~= 3 PSI ~= 20 kPa
    • I'd just like to mention that "stop," as I've always heard it used, refers to the electrical switch on the organ console, while "rank" refers to an actual set of pipes. A stop usually activates one rank, but some activate several; these are called mixtures. Many organs, especially theatre organs and smaller classical organs, have many more stops than ranks. Often, there will be stops in different divisions (great, swell, pedal, etc.) that activate the same rank. Sometimes an organ will have multiple stops t

  • Large Hot Pipe Organ (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Curl E ( 226133 )

    Yeah, it might sound great, but is it as cool as the LHPO [lhpo.org]? Quoth the site:


    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!
  • This reminds of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff [abbeymedia.com]'s remarkable art installation 40 Part Motet [abbeymedia.com], which represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale [labiennale.org] and won the Millennium Prize [gallery.ca] at the National Gallery of Canada [gallery.ca].

    Cardiff recorded Spem in Alium nunquam habui, written by Thomas Tallis in 1575. The piece is unique in that was designed for eight choirs of five people each. Cardiff made her recording by capturing each voice separately and on its own track. The piece is then played back over a circle of forty speake

  • Just some random thoughts ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by gordguide ( 307383 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @09:35PM (#7624802)
    I like pipe organs; Bach on a big pipe organ is awesome. (Re-reading that sentence it occoured to me that's probably the only time I properly used the now-trivialized word "awesome".) But lets move on ...

    I'm not much of a church goer, but whenever I'm in a new city I try to find out if there are any good pipe organs in town (a big city might have none, one, or a couple) and I will spend a Sunday morning in church.

    They all sound different, and the church itself is as much a part of the sound as anything. Pipe organs in general have lots of power, the kind you feel as much as you hear.

    I've spend most of my life in Audio, and I can tell you without any reservation at all that I've never heard a pipe organ properly reproduced on any sound system, period. Cannons? Yep.
    Full Orchestras? No problem.
    Rock n Roll? I've sworn I could reach out and touch musicians.
    Pipe Organ? I've heard it come close, but you always know.

    So, these guys can't be faulted for lack of ambition.

    A difficult concept to pull off; I would love to hear this attempt, which pretty much mandates that I go back and listen to the new organ when they rebuild it. My guess is the real deal will sound subtly better. It's a given that they will sound different, even though recreating a live insturment in the same room is less challenging than recreating something with a recording. But, since I've heard neither, that's just thinking out loud.

    I was a bit suprised to learn they chose DT speakers because the wanted a bipolar; they make good gear but there are other bipolars I would have considered (maggies, for one; I've done church installs with them and they work very well in the typical acoustic space a church provides).

    Having said that, I would have tried omnipolar speakers first; in my way of thinking they would have a better chance to reproduce the acoustic signature of pipes (omnipolar radiate 360 degrees, like an organ pipe does; bipolars radiate front + back but little to the sides).

    The Carver amps were also a bit of a suprise; I've never found them to be top-notch although they're certainly better than average.

    Of course, it all makes sense if go a bit crazy here and assume they were radical enough to have bought into some wild concept I've heard about called "A Budget".

    I agree that Linux is the proper OS. If Bill IS the Antichrist (not to say he is, but ...), the worshippers need to invite him into the fold to get that End Of The World thing going.

    Better safe than sorry, I say.

  • Music on Pipe Organ (Score:4, Informative)

    by BanjoBob ( 686644 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @10:13PM (#7625038) Homepage Journal
    Deutche Grammophon did an album by Bach that was recorded on the world's biggest pipe organ - Organ of the Jaegersborg Church, Copenhagen. The album, Famous Bach Organ Works from Karl Richter, is fantastic at tearing apart speakers :) The album, is available on CD now but mine is on an LP. If you have a great stereo, this will get you close to what a true pipe organ sounds like.

  • Some subtleties... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by anachron ( 554095 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @10:32PM (#7625122)

    I *am* an organist... and I've played some very, very good electronic instruments, but none have exactly modeled the experience of a real instrument, and it's not because of any large lapse of sound quality or discrepency in the samples or production.

    There are a combination of things that, added up, definitely detract from the unique experience of a well-built pipe organ. Often, the electronic instruments do not accurately model how a pipe speaks -- only the tone once a pipe is speaking. Also, there's a difference in the response/attack of reed pipes, flute pipes, principal pipes, etc. -- the electronic instrument often models the sound accurately, but doesn't capture the actual 'feel' of the sound, and the performer would overcompensate.

    This makes it difficult both for the listener, who will notice a difference since the electronic instrument is probably not voiced in the same way as an acoustic instrument (which is specific to the room in which the instrument is built). Also, the performer may not be comfortable with playing his Bach on a non-mechincal (or electropneumatic) instrument, and this would contribute to the feeling of unnatural-ness. (Maybe we, as performers, just haven't found a good way to deal with the actual articulation/technique problems on electronic insturments.)

    • Re:Some subtleties... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dunstan ( 97493 )
      The fundamental issue is how the air is moved - any loudspeaker will fundamentally move the air differently to an organ pipe. And the more pipes you have blowing, the more the difference matters: you can have a lot of big speakers, but a large organ with a lot of stops drawn can be blowing 200-300 pipes at once. And that is an awful lot of air moving.

      And at the same time, you have to remember that if you have a lot of loudspeakers close together, they will all cause each other to resonate, effectively a fo

  • cool but now (Score:3, Funny)

    by Adler ( 131568 ) <exsuperhero@@@teenagewildlife...com> on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @10:52PM (#7625212) Homepage Journal
    i wanna know if the volume goes up to "11"
  • They need 10 monkeys to dance...
  • The article does not say what type of keyboard action they are emulating. I fear that it is the electric action of many modern organs.

    Having listened to way too many E. Power Biggs records, I agree with his poor opinion of electric actions, which he once described as the organist telegraphing his intentions to the instrument.

    An organ that uses a mechanical tracker action to connect the keyboard to the pipes, allows the organist to control the attack of the notes. Sort of a velocity sensitive keyboard, l

    • Re:Tracker Action (Score:3, Insightful)

      by radish ( 98371 )
      Whilst I don't dispute the advantages of a truly mechanical analogue control mechanism (DJ/vinyl junkie speaking!), all you really have to measure is the velocity of the key over time. MIDI keyboards have been doing that for years. The problem is not so much measuring what the musician is doing, but the fact that a piece of plastic attached to a hinge and a sensor just doesn't feel the same as a chunk of heavy wood coated in ivory tied to a mechanism attached to a hammer. It's more the feedback to the music
      • You can do quite well in a portable keyboard (for only liftable by a weightlifter values of portable) like my Roland A90. It's got a remarkably good 'hammer action' feel, complete with that little bit of rebound you feel on a real piano when the hammer mechanism falls back after striking the string. The reason why the keyboard is so heavy is the components that make up this hammer action.

        It makes the keyboard MUCH nicer to play than your 'piece of plastic and hinge' style keyboards.
      • As an organist, I'm going to have to point out that you really don't know what you are talking about. The solution of just measuring the key velocity over time does not work as a model for a tracker action organ.

        The problem on a tracker action organ is not one of a piano, where the velocity of the key determines the velocity of the hammer, which in turn determines the sound. No, the key operates a level action, which opens a pallet (like a valve for admitting air to the pipe), which is held in place by

        • Hmm, I think we're agreeing yet disagreeing with each other. I'm not saying it's easy to model the acoustics of a mechanical system, and I'm in no way diminishing the complex way in which the sound can be manipulated by a skilled player with such a system. BUT (and it's a big but) at the human interface level all you have is a bunch of pedals and a bunch of keys. All the kays can do is go up and down. That's it. They can't go side to side, or in and out, or round and round. If you can record the velocity of

          • All the keys can do is go up and down. That's it. They can't go side to side, or in and out, or round and round. If you can record the velocity of that key over time (and it's position of course) you have all the data you can have.

            I remember thinking about this before, and I'm inclined to think you are right, now that you mention position. But yes, from this information you must perform calculations very rapidly in order to extrapolate both the feedback the simulated instrument would give and the sound t

  • Imagine... (Score:3, Funny)

    by thelizman ( 304517 ) <hammerattack.yahoo@com> on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @11:27PM (#7625393) Homepage
    ...a Beowulf Cluster of pipe organs playing Beowulf.
  • Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

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