Play the Virtual Organ from Arp Schnitger | Hacker News Reader

Play the Virtual Organ from Arp Schnitger

orgelstadt-hamburg.de

127 pointsohjeez29 comments

Oh something in my niche ! I produce French pipe organ sample sets for a living : https://www.jeuxdorgues.com

It's an extroardinary journey to record an organ, process the thousands of WAV files and design a virtual organ model.

What! For a living? Say more!

People do that with pianos and other instruments too. Some of these sample packs are very expensive. It is a small market though, I suppose.

Very cool! I'd be curious what you think of Modartt's recent attempts at physical models of organs and how they compare to more traditional sampler approaches.

https://www.modartt.com/organteq_physical_modeling

Not OP, but I've worked on programming my own organ software before. I'd say physical modelling really cool tech, but the question is whether it makes a significant auditory difference.

The thing is organs are a lot easier to sample compared to something like a violin. I'm oversimplifying, but it's mainly just note on, note off, vs lots of articulations where physical modelling is more beneficial. (Yes, there's wind sag, and wind delay, and regulators, but most organs specifically have things to avoid those artifacts so they'd only show up on more niche organs imo.) I've had great success simulating tremulants by just using FM demodulation to reconstruct the pitch and volume effects from tremmed samples[1]. Release samples are also difficult to match with the current phase, but I was also able to mitigate that with a single bin DFT + crossfaded.

Another issue with physical modelling is it's decently CPU intensive, which is tricky when you have 700 simultaneous notes on bigger organs. So, it's definitely cool, but the question is whether it's significantly better than current sample-based technology. It could potentially reproduce some of the more strange interactions, but those interactions aren't necessarily wanted in the first place.

EDIT: one thing that is nice about physical modelling is it's a lot easier to voice (modify) a pipe to the sound one wants. I think with some special filtering (comb filter for even harmonic attenuation, shelf for augmenting the harmonic series trajectory) voicing could also be satisfactory with traditional sampling (hauptwerk does some of this, but I think I could make it even more flexible).

[1] https://github.com/smj-edison/sample-analysis

From my experience with the piano one, the "tweaking the sound" aspect is where I've got the most out of it. Even just for awareness. But yeah, the physical modelling approach is probably better suited to something like piano with all its interacting resonances (and the way a tuner can change things around on a real piano).

Physical modeling seems to work really well for guitar/bass amplifiers. The Fractal Audio products are all based around simulating the various components of an amp and the ways they interact with each other, often with very unexpected results. They've been pushing in this direction for quite awhile, but I think it is more promising than capture-based tech ultimately.

The modeling is so accurate that it ends up replicating even the unintended side effects of amps, such as ghost notes (false notes being produced due to the power supply). The tech note explains it better than I can: https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/ghost-notes.126903/

Not the one you asked, but I have both Hauptwerk and Organteq, and the former beats the latter on everything expect cost, memory usage, start-up time. Organteq sounds artificial, and its reverb doesn't make it any better. Ok, you can tweak a lot, but the ensemble sound is unconvincing, and the registration choices are too limited.

What?? That’s such a specific thing to do!

Let's hear more!

You can hear many MP3 examples here: https://www.jeuxdorgues.com/jeux-d-orgues-4-lachaisedieu/

All are played with the virtual organ, what do you think?

I'll do a post soon with more stories about this project itself (that I started long ago)!

I know what a WAV file is, and I've even made some electronic music myself.

Yet my brain errored out and for a while I thought you made samples of pipe organs: little mini-organs to take home with you, to try out before you buy the big one.

"Hello! Can I interest you in trying one of our sample organs?"

You've reinvented the portative!

I'm interested in your choice to focus on French organs. Do you specifically aim to focus on French organs and not those of German type? Or is it more like a matter of convenience due to geography?

You can play it with your ASCII keyboard as well, as if it were a piano keyboard. It shows the German layout, but my Intl English keyboard works just as well.

Should you be so inclined: (short) k u (long) k (short) u y g f (long) d f.

very clever, thank you

This is super cool! I've advocated for spreading the organ to a modern audience through websites before, so it's great to see someone doing this.

In fact, I've been working off and on on my own virtual pipe organ software[1], except based around modular synthesis. I've found most modular synthesis engines don't have great support for blended midi and audio nodes, and often don't have good resources management, so I started from scratch.

[1] https://github.com/wwtos/mjuo

Long ago I sometimes played the organ. There is nothing more amazing than being alone in a large dark church, playing a pipe organ at full volume, feeling the vibrations. It's the original heavy metal. No other instrument can duplicate that feeling.

This is true—but that's something that's not very discoverable. I think getting to mess around with an organ online would pique someone's interest enough to seek out at in-person concert when they find that inevitably their speakers aren't good enough.

That's such a great project! But I'd love to see a proper VST with it, that allows voice mixing. The power of organs lays in the analog voice mixing (not simple on off, and not one voice exclusively)

https://www.hauptwerk.com/ is paid software but has a few Schnitger organs, although not the one shown off here.

There's also Sweelinq (https://sweelinq.com; subscription model), and Grand Orgue (free, but cumbersome; only a few worthwhile sample-sets), and there are some instruments for Kontakt.

Sounds great, even from so limited a platform. One octave is enough to have some fun with, if you're creative. Would have been nice to be able to combine the stops, but the plenum at least gives you a solid sound. You can really hear the character of the organ.

At first I thought it was about the biologist Arp Schnittger: https://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=tvLQFnwAAAAJ&hl=en

Went to the demo, played some basic counterpoint, probably some poorly recalled lines from Bach, and I always get surprised how well the music of that time fits the instrument capabilities.

Beautiful sound - could anyone here point me to a method to upload such sounds onto standard keyboards (e.g. Yamaha PSR or Casio CT series), please? Thanks i.a.

Just from the online brochure on the Yamaha website, we learn that the PSR E473 has "quick samping":

"Capture sound from outside of your instrument using the AUX input, microphone input or even by importing files from a USB storage device, and then play those sounds directly from your keyboard. The possibilities are endless!"

No idea how good that is.

Anyway there must be a user manual. Possibly even tutorial videos.

I'll chime in with a related project: https://openpipes.org

my keyboard apparently only allows to press three keys simultaneously. But when I switch browser tabs/windows while pressing a key, the keyup event apparently is not send to the previously focused window. For this virtual organ, this means it keeps playing the tone and therefore allowing to play more than three tones.

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