How a Pipe Organ Works (2020) | Hacker News Reader

How a Pipe Organ Works (2020)

pipedreams.org

83 pointsdskhatri18 comments

Oxford Music Online has a great article that goes into a lot of detail - https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.44010 and fittingly remarks that

>The organ is, together with the clock, the most complex of all mechanical instruments developed before the Industrial Revolution. Among musical instruments its history is the most involved and wide-ranging, and its extant repertory the oldest and largest. Despite its essentially indirect and therefore relatively inflexible production of sound, no other instrument has inspired such avowed respect as the organ, ‘that great triumph of human skill … the most perfect musical instrument’ (Grove), ‘in my eyes and ears … the king of instruments’ (Mozart, letter to his father, 17–18 October 1777).

Stephen Malinowski's famous YouTube channel of animated graphical scores has a great selection of organ pieces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXaCmhAMnHs&list=PLA20FE13E9...

St. Cecilia, pray for us!

> The organ is, together with the clock, the most complex of all mechanical instruments developed before the Industrial Revolution

Or to put it more strongly: the most complex machines on the planet for roughly 2000 years. The starting point usually acknowledged is Ctesibius's hydraulis, an organ with a simple automatic pump (no calcant or animal labour required) and pressure regulation. That was about 250BC. They were still producing innovations well after the industrial revolution, e.g. pneumatic relays.

It is nice to know that Pipedreams is still going and even with Michael Barone still hosting after all these years. My earliest memory of music and one of my earliest memories is the opening sequence of Rollerball with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, my father was watching it on cable* sometime around 1980 when I was ~3 and it had a major impact. Few years later I heard Toccata and Fugue in D Minor a second time on the drive home from a family event or something, I don't think the actual piece was played but just a few of the opening bars as a demonstration but it was enough to trigger the memory of the opening sequence of Rollerball and I became a weekly listener for the next 20 odd years.

I did not learn that it was Rollerball that I had watched the opening of all those years ago until sometime after the turn of the century when the original started getting heavy replay on late night TV because the remake was coming out soon.

*I suppose cable in this context is rather archaic these days, as is the idea of a "cable ready" TV and cable boxes. Wood grained plastic was pretty much the internet of those day.

https://www.retroist.com/p/jerrold-cable-tv-boxes

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLluPQLh1xzlI7EMB5qIxD...

Highly recommend this youtube playlist by Look Mum No Computer, who bought an old church pipe organ, disassembled it and reassembled it at his museum.

And he does in fact end up installing a (smol) computer so he can use it with MIDI, as well as LEDs on each pipe so when a note sounds you can see which pipe makes it.

The Museum is small but well worth a visit, especially if you are interested in electronic music or telecoms.

And here's a related from someone i wish would do a crossover with Sam someday!

Anna Lapwood touring the Royal Albert Hall organ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq0s17bzdLI

Bonus related rec if you need a smile in your day. Anna Lapwoord playing that organ with Bonobo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdyAF9M3XVw

Too bad Sam doesn't know what hes doing.

My brother just finished building an automatic pipe organ for his Mechanical Engineering senior project. Or maybe you'd call it a street organ since it has no keyboard. It has midi input on some arduino-like device, 3d printed pipes, a hand crank pump to fill the bellows, and a bunch of shift registers, relays, and solenoids (on breadboards at this point) to open the valves for the pipes. It turned out really nice, and was a hit at the project showcase. I was involved in helping him figure out the electronics and the code, though I think he threw out the code I wrote in favor of using ChatGPT. All in all, it's not a technically difficult thing to make, though I have the benefit of his hindsight at this point. Maybe I'll get him to write it up at some point.

Given this is HN, how can we talk about pipe organs without mentioning Donald Knuth's?

Eight foot pipes. In his house.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html

I had always understood that the surrounding cathedral was part of the instrument, too.

Imagine my surprise when we went to hear Robert Plimpton work out in Balboa Park...

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-plimpton-0802761b/

https://web.archive.org/web/20141129041425/https://www.sandi...

Outdoor pipe organs are really impressive, but a pipe organ tuned for an acoustically matched building is something else.

So many Catholics may focus on things like the removal of altar rails, but it would seem that the decay and removal of working pipe organs has been a significantly painful loss for many parishes.

Often these organs were too massive, specialist, and expensive to maintain (or even just to operate them) and that lack often prompted a complete overhaul of a congregation’s repertoire, as guitar-strummers and tambourine-clappers would be called in to fill the gaps.

Even electronic organs could not suffice, as they proved harder to maintain as their unique technologies aged poorly.

Nothing against folk music, but the transition and loss of continuity has really messed with some of us, spiritually.

I am thankful that around these parts, we’ve had some responsible pastors who not only cared about music, but also found the resources to rehabilitate several churches and get their pipe organs updated for the 21st century, with a firm establishment of music ministers who could carry on that legacy for the foreseeable future.

> the surrounding cathedral was part of the instrument

This is absolutely the case. I studied organ during my high school years. The instrument where I took my lessons was a large church and the instrument had an antiphonal section. The time that it takes for the pipe to begin speaking and for the sound to reach the console is enough to upset the ear-brain-hand connection.

To a certain extent this interaction is true with any acoustic instrument. I’m mostly a pianist now and I’d say that so many aspects of technique that are altered by the acoustic qualities of the venue - pedalling, legato, spacing.

Related (loosely):

The story of my home made pipe organ (2000) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42831969 - Jan 2025 (52 comments)

Paper Pipe Organ (2019) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39000648 - Jan 2024 (6 comments)

Organ pipe physics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38853087 - Jan 2024 (66 comments)

OpenPipes: Build your open-source virtual pipe organ system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36873573 - July 2023 (27 comments)

The organ as a wind instrument - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34309230 - Jan 2023 (105 comments)

Self-Playing Pipe Organ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111869 - Oct 2018 (7 comments)

Teeny-Tiny, Handmade Pipe Organ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13711526 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)

Pipe Organ desk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10778499 - Dec 2015 (25 comments)

Pneumatic logic board made entirely from wood doubles as desk/organ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2788069 - July 2011 (4 comments)

The Surprising Physics of Pipe Organs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803341 - Sept 2009 (1 comment)

Semi related, here's a modern, young artist who composes music for pipe organs that use tunings from the Baroque era. [1]

The music is minimalistic at first ear, but the tension and release caused by the slightly out of tune notes [2] is really pleasant IMO.

[1] https://kalimalone.bandcamp.com/track/all-life-long-for-orga...

[2] Out of tune to equal temperament, which is what nearly all modern music western music uses.

I am surprised to see Kali Malone mentioned here! But yes, I also highly recommend listening to her work, especially if you like ambient or meditative music

I am surprised too!

Can you recommend some other similar artists??

Relevant: https://www.linusakesson.net/sixtyforgan/index.php

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