Slashdot Mirror
Linux PCs Drive 74-Channel Pipe Organ
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."
...don't have amplifiers or computers but usually do have >100 pipes.
So this is a modern pipe organ?
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.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
If you need 10 boxen to drive 74 things.
Linux: Perfect for playing with your organ
"Krispy Kreme outlet to open in Surrey!"
"Bif Naked practices with her band in Surrey!"
Now if only they could find a 74-channel pipe organ in Surrey. It would be the SLASHDOT-SURREY-NOW~! crossover!
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
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
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.
Bitter and proud of it.
Didn't like the BSD logo
A local church built a new sanctuary. They moved their very fine old pipe organ from to the new sanctuary.
It was an intricate task that was completed successfully. The local news heralded, . . . "St. Paul Completes Organ Transplant."
Is this thing on sourceforge yet? freshmeat? Or is it just a scheme to lur geeks to church?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
If I hear this stupid CNN coined phrase one more time I'm going to puke all over my shorts.
Beware the above link is probably not suited for children or parents/anyone else that may be seated with or standing behind you. In fact the faint hearted may be disturbed by it.
24/7 streaming organ music. The internet truly has something for everbody.
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.
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.
So I think they just stuck to the attack/hold/release model and used extensive and clever sampling. A proper mathematical model would probably have require too much processing power even with 10 PCs, Linux or not.
They like it loud, do you know?
What I want to know is who measured the distance as exactly 600 ft. from Ground Zero and why.
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.
...this sounds like rock and/or roll.
PC-enabled tones rise from ruins of 9/11
By Ron Wilson
EE Times
December 3, 2003 (4:30 p.m. ET)
SAN MATEO, Calif. -- As the towers of the World Trade Center crumbled on that September day two years ago, the plume of debris they spewed claimed a victim that, although not human, was nonetheless irreplaceable to those who loved it: the mighty pipe organ in Trinity Episcopal Church at Broadway and Wall Street. Dust and detritus from the collapse rendered the church's 80-year-old Aeolian-Skinner organ unusable.
But that lesser tragedy opened the door to a unique story -- of musical skill, love of an instrument, insight into signal processing and innovation in electronic systems design -- that this year has brought about a resurrection of sorts. Today a new mighty organ plays at Trinity -- not a pipe organ, but perhaps the most innovative electronic instrument ever to fill a sacred space.
For Douglas Marshall and David Ogletree, principals of the Marshall & Ogletree LLC organ company in Needham Heights, Mass.), the loss at Trinity Church would transform what had been a hobby, perhaps an obsession, into a product development. It would be a unique chance to prove that the contrarian ideas they had formed over the course of a decade were correct, and that conventional wisdom about sampled-data electronic instruments was at best incomplete.
Vanished gloryThe story began long before terrorists boarded airplanes that late-summer morning in 2001. Marshall and Ogletree, who grew up 15 years apart in Westwood, Mass., and who both went on to careers as concert organists, in the early 1990s formed a company to represent major organ builders to the church market.
Along the way the two developed a love of the great Aeolian-Skinner pipe organs that are arguably the finest organs ever built in North America. With the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co. gone, Marshall and Ogletree speculated about how the sounds -- and, more important, the playing experience -- of such instruments could be preserved.
They hit upon a project to record samples of existing instruments around the United States and experiment with them. "We had hoped that we could build some sort of addition to an electronic organ that would convey the real sound of these instruments," Ogletree explained.
The theory of sampling musical instruments is relatively straightforward. Depending on its physics, an instrument has an attack, a steady-state and a release, each of which has a different tonal signature. This complexity can be reduced substantially by a few approximations -- for instance, using the steady-state tone and simply modifying it with attack and release envelopes, perhaps throwing in some transients known to occur at the opening and closing of the "voice."
In this sort of approach, it's only necessary to get a good recording of a moment of the instrument's steady-state voice, and the rest is signal processing.
But Marshall and Ogletree ran into a problem: That approach didn't end up sounding like the real thing. "In 1997 or so, we were doing experiments with the digital sampling software that was just coming on the market," Ogletree said. "They were just starting to stream high-fidelity recording onto hard disks, and we were playing with it. We began to realize that the length of the recording made far more difference than we had believed."
It had been assumed, Ogletree explained, that the sonic content of an organ voice matched what most people reported hearing. There is an initial, transient period of a second or so, after which the human ear can identify a particular note and stop, and then the voice remains constant until the release.
But the data Marshall and Ogletree were collecting contradicted that. "The tone actually become steady a very long time after it seems to have settled," Ogletree said. "Recorded samples of the attack have to be as long as 15 to 20 seconds to capture the actual voice, because there are things going on during that entire period -- it's not a
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
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?
... but c'mon, my Helmut Walcha CD's don't sound THAT bad, do they?
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
eikimartinson.com
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?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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 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.)
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
Blender is open source, so if your friend wants a fork in it all he has to do is download the code and write it himself.
check out http://www.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).
-- the cake is a lie
SCO will tell them to change their tune if they complain about license fees :)
Linux user blows own trumpet...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
15,000 watts of Ina Gada Da Vida, the extended version...
Were it my pick I don't think I would be particularly drawn to DefTech's. Yeah, they have been doing bipolars for quite some time and the spaciousness of bipolar sound should be impressive, but somebody like Mirage would have been further up my list.
However, it is the subwoofer design and usage that intrigues me! While I'm no bass-hound, shake your guts from my vehicle kinda guy, pipe organs produce some tremendously low frequencies. When you get to sub 20hz frequencies, you begin to go below the average humans audible range. The sound starts to become less heard and more "experienced". Makes me wonder just how sensitive their sampling equipment was and just how they are setting up the subs, and more importantly the crossovers, for this monster.
Sample based synthesis basically sucks. Why didn't spend the time and money developing a truly good physical model?
A physical model of an instrument models the sound producing mechanism with equations, and responds like the real thing (or at least *very* close when it is a good model).
They need such huge amplification because these big pipe organs are really loud: in the Sydney Town Hall organists are forbidden from playing the lowest notes because it shakes the foundations of the building (and the town hall is a very big and sturdy building). NB I'm serious!
In the first paragraph it states that
Dust and detritus from the collapse rendered the church's 80-year-old Aeolian-Skinner organ unusable.
I saw a *BSD-based pipe organ once. All it could play was dirges and Jerry Garcia tunes.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"THX-The audience is listening"
"Turn it up!"
The Organ of Don and Jill Knuth
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.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Since it has speakers rather than pipes, if you had a lot of them, would you have a Beowoofer cluster?
su finn
echo 'jack in, case' | festival --tts &
killall case
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
who'd have thunk it?
Anybody recently seen a concert at the TMH? They have a fire captain come and brief the audience on how to escape if a fire happens.
Due to the seating, narrow stairs, and all the fine wood panels and trim, the place is a firetrap.
It really does sound fantastic though
Haha. Some assembly required!
All the money they saved on OS, and they bought Carver?
does it run Linux...
ok, never mind
Imagine a beowulf claster..
Ah forget it....
And far from it.
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).
p ://www.deadmedia.org/notes/16/162-comment.html
http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/16/162.html
htt
Fuck this fake digital shit, sometimes analog is way cooler, especially when it involves exploding large amounts of flammable gases.
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.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I actually thought of another Stephenson novel, The Big U. There's a subplot that features a gargantuan pipe organ and the effects of resonance at 16 Hz...very good book, if a little rough.
Your brain is not a computer.
the point is not to entertain.
have so many children ?
Because his organ had no stops...
(Btw, thanks for the technical info !)
Does it run Virgil FoxPro??
Anyone who browses Slashdot with his/her family around should know better.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Yeah, it might sound great, but is it as cool as the LHPO? Quoth the site:
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
Well, that may be real organ music. But for a HUGE fake "organ" (you know, since the article is about a fake organ), look here.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Direct link: Silophone.net
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
This reminds of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff's remarkable art installation 40 Part Motet, which represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale and won the Millennium Prize at the National Gallery of Canada.
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 speakers in the installation space (here's how it looked at the Tate). I saw it when it was at the National Gallery, where it was set up in the Gallery's Rideau Chapel.
The effect is breathtaking - from outside the room it sounds like a normal choral piece, but once inside your perspective changes. By standing in the middle of the circle you can feel the voices blend and wash over you. You can then walk up to each of the speaker sets and hear that group's harmony. Step closer and you can hear each individual voice. By moving around the room you can experience different parts of the sound sculpture.
When the piece ends there is complete silence. After about a minute you can hear rustling and whispering from speakers as the choir gets ready, and then the piece begins again. You have to hear it to understand.
The end result is a complete immersive 3-dimensional aural experience that, like the organ, would be completely impossible to replicate with one, two, or even a handful of speakers.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
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 ...
...), the worshippers need to invite him into the fold to get that End Of The World thing going.
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
Better safe than sorry, I say.
I saw an interview with Jim Lord from Deep Purple recently where he talked about the church organ recording they did for one song.
They just loved the sound this particular organ made in some isolated church.
To record it they actually set up a telephone line from the church to the recording studio.
Bizarre but they where not able to bring any mobile recording equipment to the church.
I don't see where the "74" comes from, either. It looks to me as if the stop count on the A-S at Trinity would be 115 stops. Note that there's a lot more to building a *good* organ than throwing in a large array of pipework. Does the complete ensemble work together? Does each stop contribute some real character? If one stop sounds too much like another, it's added expense without a lot of benefit. If it clashes tonally with other stops, that limits its usefulness.
/.'ing Osiris, but then my characters per line goes too low to post...
Aside: The bipolar pattern of the DT speakers raises my eyebrows a bit, since the rear projection is 180 degrees out of phase from the front. I can't think of a pipe configuration that would have that characteristic.
Drat! I wanted to post the stoplist here to avoid
Perhaps you should fucking move.
What do you want them to write about? Shit that's happening in Bolivia?
Fucktard.
Wonderfull give Ney Yorkers a 15,000 Watt Pipe organ, any bets on how long it will be before someone plays Phantom of the Opera on it ?
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.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Sweet Jesus save us all, the sense of humor is gone from the world.
Wow computers can do stuff? Who knew? And 600 feet from 'ground zero'? Who the fuck cares? "I'm making this post from my computer, only 2000 miles from 'ground zero'." Ooooooooo, how poignant. Fuck off.
Actually, I've got to say that Mac zealots are the holiest, but now there's OSX for new and improved snobbery.
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.)
Thanks for the hearty chuckle :-)
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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.
Nonetheless, you must have admiration for the engineers who developed this organ. It's truly a marvelous feat of engineering.
Not to be confused with the marvelous (?) feet of engineers.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
i wanna know if the volume goes up to "11"
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
"I just knew SCO was going to sue God sooner or later..."
Only about the best SCO comment I've seen in a while
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
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.
I live in Troy myself, and I must say the Troy Music Hall is an amazing place to go for a concert if anybody ever gets the chance. I knew some people in the Empire State Youth Orchestra, and they played there a couple times a year, so I usually went to those concerts. It was amazing.
I wonder... would this story have been selected had the OS been Windows or OS X?
Wish I would make an account so I could do it myself...
1 PSI ~= 27.6799048 inches of water ~= 6.8947573 kPa
80 inches of water ~= 3 PSI ~= 20 kPa
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
They need 10 monkeys to dance...
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, like a piano. The article didn't say if they tried to model this.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...a Beowulf Cluster of pipe organs playing Beowulf.
Especially when "ground zero" was 70-some stories in the air.
Ever heard of "significant figures?" There's only one in 600. That means the measurement is really 600 +-50ft.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Ahh - spatial placement, now THAT makes sense. Of course, that would also imply that each speaker is placed at a different height - maybe at the center of the "pipe" it represents. I wonder if golden ears could detect the fact that the sound comes more from a "point" than a "line".
:)
I agree with you about the bass, but that doesn't neccessarily require so many channels, just a couple of really powerful subwoofers, as mentioned in the article. By the way, is it true that the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor hits 16 Hz? Neal Stephenson used this fact (if fact it be) as a nice little gimmick in his very first novel _The Big U_ - it was enough to destroy buildings.
eikimartinson.com
do you realize how disgusting that is? the person is dead. DEAD.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Who doesn't like free music?
Thank goodness this 74-channel pipe organ isn't connected to the net! Otherwise, it could be susceptible to the same vulnerabilities that befell GNU, GNOME, Debian, Gentoo, and FSF.
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 sound, because it is incapable of recreating the full range of sounds accurately (emphasis on full).
While I grant that very slight differences in pitch (440/441 is actually differentiable for most people) and volume (10db is virtually inaudible) are difficult to discern, that's not the issue. It's the overall timbre of the sound that humans can very easily distinguish. A soprano singing on stage sounds very different from a recording of that soprano being played from a speaker in the same spot. The same goes for a violin/guitar/trumpet/basoon/etc. And doubly so for electronic versions of the same.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
Are you sure that wasn't Rick Wakeman from Yes? Because he did that for the song "Awaken" on the album "Going for the One" (released in 1977).
I think the rationale was that in 1977, truly high quality recording equipment was not portable and was not cheap. Back then, they tended to use things like 1 inch wide tape that ran at 15 inches per second. These tape machines were many, many thousands of dollars and not meant to be carted around. Also, back then the phone lines were analog and in some cases very good quality.
Damned Linux religious zealots!
Hm, now where's that Soundblaster 8 clone with the non-wavetable MIDI I had lying around?
I'm gonna go nab myself a piece of the market!
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
'Ground Zero' was coined by someone else. Sorry. You were close though.
they made a sound font available for us to try. If anybody is curious about trying some sampled sound fonts, http://www.hammersound.net/ has a pretty good collection. My favorite organ sound font there is JEUX 1.4 found towards the bottom of this page.
FYI: LinuxSampler is under heavy development and you can already stream multi Gigabyte .GIG samples (in GigaStudio/Gigasampler format) directly from disk (without evenveloping yet but that will be added soon).
If you can please join their mailinglist / development group.
Is in Passau in Germany. Google it, I am lazy and I just remembered I was there.
What about other interesting tidbist like oldest, loudest, etc.?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...he said organ. ;)
... claims the "their is bigger than the Danish'"....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D minor is cool but not so booming (I do like the Gyruss remix though).
do you realise it's a cartoon? A CARTOON.
Yeah, the Japanese are sick, so what.
I guess Waterhouse would be jumping with joy over the reintroduction of pipe-orgain into computing :-)
-.sig sauer-
Depends on the instrument you play it on. Your church around the corner almost certainly doesn't have a pipe that can play that pitch. (Unless you live around the corner from Trinity National Cathedral in Washington DC.) So you can play Passacaglia and Fugue in Cm on that organ but never hit anything near that note.
In Bach's time, a typical pipe organ's lowest pitched stop was 16', a pitch around 30 Hz. Only an exceptionally large, unusual instrument of the period had a 32' pitch, which can hit 16 Hz. Certainly Bach wasn't composing with 32' ranks of pipes in mind. An organist can choose to play Bach with these stops, though he's taking some artistic license to do so. (Not that I mind, it sounds really neat!)
--Thad, who knows his organs! ;)
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Much like a newborn puppy...
Thanks for the knowledge. Pity that I live in Florida, which must surely be thin on such instruments.
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