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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.
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.
"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.