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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.
Linux: Perfect for playing with your organ
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
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.
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.
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
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.)
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
"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.
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?
Actually, it was coined by the New York Times. The guy who wrote the article about the Nagasaki bombing back in '46 added "ground" to the "zero" that they put at the middle of the maps they handed out to the reporters about the projected damage to make it sound like he was all "embedded" and shit. Talking about lighting-filled clouds rising thousands of feet above "zero" sounds kinda stupid, though, so he changed it to "Ground Zero" to make it sound more dramatic and jargon-y.
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
have so many children ?
Because his organ had no stops...
(Btw, thanks for the technical info !)
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.
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
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.)
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.