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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.
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.)
"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.