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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."
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.
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.
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.
Agreed, this is by no means a pipe organ as the title of the post says, just a rather advanced electronic organ.
A large pipe organ will have thousands of pipes, but looking back into the article it does not state that 74 pipes will be represented, but 74 audio channels and therefore 74 speakers.
That would explain the large amount of computing power needed, you have to receive the input, and quickly retrieve/generate enough audio data to represent potentially thousands of pipes in 74 independent audio channels.
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.)
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!
Actually, IIRC, the term was coined by the atomic scientists on the Manhattan Project to refer to the epicenter of the first atomic detonation at Trinity Site in New Mexico.
In theory at least, any sound experience can be reproduced with only two channels - we only have two ears after all.
Of course that would require listening with high quality headphones and a recording that is perfectly matched to the HRTF of the listener (Head Related Transfer Function - basically the how the shape of your head and ears effect the sound coming in from different directions in to your ears).
I once did a simple experiment, I placed two small microphones in my ears, connected them to my MD recorder and walk around a while recording. I then played it back in a quiet room using headphones.
It was spooky - I could tell exactly where each sound was coming from, the cars going by etc.
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
Remember that a real organ has a limited amount of air to work with. Yes, an organist can make a chord of 12 with 10 fingers and two feet, but if you are trying to pump a limited number of air through a massive amount of different air channels, how many of them do you think will actually resonate enough to make any noise?
Actually, it was coined by the New York Times.
No, it's an actual technical term that refers to a useful concept when discussing the effects on the ground of air-burst explosions.
From The United States Strategic Bombing Survey The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Chairman's Office, 30 June 1946:
For convenience, the term "ground zero" will be used to designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation, or "air zero.")
Some organs do actually have amazingly large pumps for air.
Here's an example of one that might be able to do the job.
Granted, it is one of the world's largest organs, so it's a bad example, but anyway check out the MP3 sample of the conclusion of the Liszt piece. Awesome!
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 form of cross talk. On the other hand, organ pipes are made of metal, and cause very little cross resonance.
These guys have created a magnificent instrument, probably at a tiny fraction of the cost of a pipe organ (and with a fraction of the lead time), but I bet that playing it is like kissing your auntie - missing the frisson of the real thing.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town