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Comment by aczerepinski | Hacker News Reader

Same. My instruments piano and trumpet are never-miss (though I hear the trumpet in Bb), and organs are more difficult for me too. I think organ overtones might be off pitch or something? just a wild guess.

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Depends on which stops are pulled on the organ. If it's just octaves (8', 4', 2', 16'...), then it will be quite pure, depending on what kind of stops are playing (flutes and principals are purer than reeds, for instance). If you add a mutation (2-2/3', 1-3/5', a mixture of multiple mutations...), then you'll have both the impurity of the mutations themselves, as well as their own overtones.

Or, you could have a string stop pulled, which is purposefully slightly out-of-tune to produce a "string" sound when paired with an in-tune stop.

A typical "pipe organ" sound on a digital keyboard will often have mixtures and other mutations. I've found that settings with names like "church organ" tend to be purer, perhaps only some flutes and principals.

Piano overtones are normally off-pitch (in a sense), and guitar too, to a lesser extent. I would imagine organ overtones to be highly dependent on the design of the specific instrument, but I'm guessing they are largely more harmonic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning

Mostly I feel like the timbre of an organ note is very consistent from pitch to pitch, whereas, say, an A on a piano sounds buzzy to me while a Bb sounds more smooth and a B natural is kind of liquid. (Of course the timbre probably isn't really changing much but that's how my brain perceives it.)

I just read a comment above that discussed this timbre sensitivity. In any octave the A sounds buzzy? What about on any piano? Do all 88 keys produce a kind of unique timbre signature for you?

A just has a kind of a buzzy feel to it. It's not something I can really quantify or prove, just a sort of synaesthetic sense. I would say that I feel it the strongest in the two octaves below middle C. It is basically true for any piano. I don't have a mapping for all 88 notes on a piano, and it's not like you could hand me a timbre and I could identify the corresponding pitch. The whole thing is shifty enough that I assume something else is actually going on and this is just the way that my conscious brain makes sense of it. But it is part of the way that I perceive pitch.

Organs don't have inharmonic overtones, but organ tuning changes with air pressure/temperature/humidity, and organs are a big hassle to tune, so in practice organs rarely play at A=440Hz.

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