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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
Didn't like the BSD logo
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.
If you've seen a large pipe organ they can consist of thousands of pipes spread over a rather large area. The acoustic effect of having different tones coming from totally different areas of an auditorium is completely different than placing a hundred speakers throughout and having every one of them replicating the same sound.
There's more to it than that...but that's all I feel qualified to bring up.
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
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?
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.)