How pipe organs make sound | Sci NC

Engineers show how the giant pipe organ at Raleigh’s Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral is built and how it makes sound.

[@squiremuldoon5462]

I guess this video assumes you already know how organs work and it just reminds you that the size of the pipes affects the sound...

[@whirlarc5916]

the old way that organs work is that down below there are a bunch of fat guys blowing air

[@oscarcasillas-vallejo8284]

Thank you Zach

[@je5624]

The frequency is healing

[@tb8573]

Wow! Quite a feat to spend 5 minutes explaining how a church organ works, completely without explaining where the air comes from. All about how large the pipes are and how many months it took to make and install them. Not a word about how the music is actually being produced.

[@StopFear]

Maybe the fact that video is only 5 minutes should have given you a hint? A very strange thing to complain about.

[@tb8573]

@@StopFear Yeah, you´re right. There is not enough time there. XD

[@ElloImNoodle]

Well depends on when in time we are talking about. The air can come from multiple different places such as water powered, electric blower or manually pumped by humans

[@deformedmuffin1265]

Now I just really want to make my own personal organ.

[@mickkennedy1344]

3:06 - - so these are 1/2 wave pipes

[@lu546]

amazing video

[@kevindelaney5440]

why is this narrated by chris hanson?

[@FrostyXVI]

0:44 what song is this?

[@realizenow3165]

Darude sandstorm

[@buellerferris]

Asshole

[@JonOfOld]

The tune is called 'Hyfrydol' and is one of a few pieces that hymn 'Love Devine All Loves Excelling' is commonly set to.

[@flextape8661]

@@buellerferris not funny and immature answer

[@andrewbarrett1537]

Thank you!

[@Dessme]

But I haven't heard these things explained. 1st does the organ use electricity? They said it is a wind instrument and I guess it uses one. But they should have told us. 2nd does it use an amplifier? Here again I guess they use one because the pipe is out there and it should have decent volume to be heard all over the room. And then I guess it also has some volume control which works electronically. That is my assumption. Anybody has any know how pls share your knowledge. Thanks.

[@leavewe]

Originally organ pipes got the required air pressure (or 'wind') by use of bellows pumped mechanically like the kind you'd see on accordion (only bigger). Nowadays they use electric blowers to produce the required wind (big fans), but the pipes themselves are still acoustic. They are not electrically amplified, there are no speakers in a pipe organ. A pipe has no volume control by itself but mechanical or electrical shutters are installed in front of rooms where some ranks reside, this can let the organist control swells and volume by use of graduation on one or more pedals located in front of the pedal keyboard. In short, the blowers for the air do, and no, pipe organs aren't amplified.

[@leavewe]

to add to my answer here's a video of an organ with hand pumped bellows: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mGGWgZipaq90o5o no electricity there Here's the room with the blowers for the organ at Boardwalk Hall: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rIO0o4t6jtOWmbc electricity is used

[@Dessme]

@@leavewe Thank you!

[@andrewbarrett1537]

Hi, pipe organs are generally acoustic instruments, although some more recent (1980s to present) organs have been built as hybrids with both pipes AND speakers for additional digital stops / voices. Some other old pipe organs have been expanded with digital voices, usually but not always for low notes which would require very long pipes that don’t always fit. For example, few organs have a true 32’ rank, although some medium large classical organs have a STOPPED 32’ flute (bourdon) rank, the lowest pipe of which is “only” about 17’ or so long due to it being stopped (meaning it can sound the same note as an open pipe twice the length). Open 32’ ranks are very rare due to few buildings being able to hold them and also the great expense of these pipes so digital versions can help.

[@andrewbarrett1537]

Pipe organs mostly predate the advent of amplifiers, which was generally in the mid 1920s or so and used mostly for home radio and the newest (and most expensive) phonographs, as well as new recording processes. For the most part, the pipe organ has remained an unamplified instrument until recent times. A few organs with percussion stops (bells, xylophone etc) have had THEM amplified thru the PA system in the building, to make them louder (such as the Atlantic City Convention Hall main Auditorium organ), but the vast majority of organs with percussions (mostly, theatre pipe organs), have them unamplified, and the actions are designed adjusted to beat the instrument forte or fortissimo, and the percussions put in the pipe chamber with the pipes, to get softer and louder with the pipes as the swell shades on the front of the chamber are closed and opened by the organist. A very few theatre organs have multiple-volume percussion actions, like the fancier orchestrions. The Link theatre organs built in Binghamton, New York are notable in this regard.

[@Hx_jamie]

It's just piano but with pipes?

[@Southwestern1872]

no, its alot different lol.

[@andrewbarrett1537]

Pianos have strings which are hit by hammers to make the sounds; organs have pipes through which air flows to make the sounds. So, a piano is a string and percussion instrument operated by a keyboard; a pipe organ is a wind instrument operated by a keyboard. Hope this helps.

[@williamviverette1368]

This organ doesn’t work in this room at all. It sounds wonderful in the loft but is not pleasing at all to listen to in the nave.

[@TheJakeman789]

There’s always that one person...

[@andrewbarrett1537]

I take it you have heard this organ in person? I hope your opinion is based on this and not just the video audio or some recording. There is really no substitute for hearing an organ in person.

[@andrewbarrett1537]

*actually I just re-read your comment. I presume you have been in both the loft and the nave in person. Your opinion/comment does bring up another great point: the success or failure of a particular organ installation can be as much about the building itself as the organ itself, due to the way the acoustics of the pipes and building interact with each other. Thus, whether others familiar with this organ agree or disagree with you, it is a real issue to do with pipe organs in general which I am not sure is otherwise in this video, so thanks for bringing it up.

[@StopFear]

The more videos I watched about various pipe organs the more I come to despise them. I think they and people who love them deserve to be criticized. A pipe organ costs astonishing amount of money. Google says it could be “as low as $30 000” and as john as $850 000. That is just the instrument. Add to that the shipping and installation. Since the one in the video is huge it’s probably on the high side. How can ANYBODY justify spending/wasting so much money on such a superficial thing? Especially an organization like a church. Think how many people could be fed either here in the US or in different parts of the world. People could be fed, clothed, cured of diseases etc. But no, someone had to get this materialistic superficial thing in a church to allegedly glorify God. I just feel so bad when i contrast how people suffer somewhere from lack of necessities with this organ.

[@bodyno3158]

Superficial things, agh, here we go again. Another nazi pretending to be a commie. How you define human without those "superficial things"? In your mind those suffering people only deserve being fed, clothed, cured of diseases like cattles? Don't they deserve a pipe organ, an orchestra, a string quartet after they were fed, clothed, cured of diseases? You don't even treat people as human, the book that you should be looking for is Mein Kampf rather than Das Kapital.

[@andrewbarrett1537]

You know, on the one hand I philosophically agree with you in terms of wastefulness, BUT a pipe organ for most churches was a one time purchase/outlay during the building of the church, after which it could last 100 years or more (the oldest pipe organs still playing are over 500 years old, which is greater longevity than most other musical instruments, most others of which of that age are too delicate now to be played, displayed in museums). But you have to understand that the expense of pipe organs is due to the way they work: i.e. one pipe produces one note, and so to get multiple notes, you need multiple pipes. This is different than most other human played (mouth blown) wind instruments where there is one tube / pipe, with various holes drilled in it which are covered and uncovered by pads / fingers while the musician plays, to get different notes. One *could* build a pipe organ on this principle (fewer pipes playing multiple notes each) but I have never seen one. The closest thing I know is a special kind of bass rank found in some organs, which only has 6 pipes instead of the usual 12, and each pipe plays two adjacent pitches via a valve pad opening and closing a hole. The drawback of this system is that it is usually fairly slow to operate, so one cannot alternate between those two notes very quickly. This problem would be even more pronounced with higher treble notes than with bass notes. Also, pipe SCALING (the ratio of width to length) is all-important in creating TIMBRE (tone color). The wider a flue pipe is in relation to length, the more “fluty” (like a flute or recorder) sounding it is; the narrower a flue pipe is in relation to its length, the more “stringy” (like a violin) sounding it is. “Diapason” or “principal” flue pipes, the archetypal church organ tone, are halfway between these and produce a tone halfway between fluty and stringy. If you use a single pipe of a single diameter to produce many octaves of notes (via drilled holes covered with movable pads like a flute, for example), the timbre will change quite a lot from the lowest to the highest note, due to the width remaining the same while the speaking length changes. Thus it would not sound like the same “instrument”. Mouth blown instruments solve these intonation problems by the player changing their mouth/embouchure from low to high register in the instrument; and also, these instruments are narrower in range than most pipe ranks: a regular C flute can play only 37 notes from C to C; a regular Bb soprano clarinet can play only 41 notes from low E to high G#. It *might* be possible to design a special organ windchest to blow a single pipe with multiple wind pressures etc but I am only aware of a handful of instruments that have it, and in these, the pipes are not specially made to handle different pressures so actually go more in or out of tune(!). So one would need to design special pipes to go with the special chest, that would work more like human wind players play their instruments. Thus, organ pipes are “scaled” with the width varying from pipe to pipe, as well as length, to maintain the correct timbre of that pipe rank all up and down the rank. Finally, classical pipe organs work by combining multiple blending ranks of low pressure pipes together to result in what is called an “ensemble” sound, which can be varied by turning on and off various ranks. Theatre pipe organs, by contrast, have a smaller number of high pressure ranks which (in the smaller theatre organs) are quite dissimilar, contrasting solo voices, which are meant to emulate orchestra instruments as closely as possible and be used in combination like orchestra instruments, with their tones still standing out in the “blend”. Two different kinds of pipe organs for two different uses: one designed for classical and liturgical music (although there are many different sub types of “classical” organ including medieval, baroque, classical and romantic/orchestral organs of various types) and the other designed for motion picture accompaniment with salon, mood and popular music.

[@andrewbarrett1537]

Your idea of the pipe organ becoming “superficial” is fast becoming a reality: as many churches switch from pipe organs to praise bands or electronic organs; or go out of existence altogether, due to declining/aging membership, many pipe organs are offered for sale, for free, and scrapped/destroyed, which IMO is even more wasteful than buying a new one. Just today I have an entire 15’ truck full of organ pipes in very bad to fair condition that I have spent a year or so rescuing from a barn in the greater Los Angeles area. If I didn’t rescue them in time , they would have all gone to scrap, and this includes the pipes and chests of a 4 or 5 rank Geneva theatre organ that I’ve been seeking for the past 25 years, that other organ friends had assumed was long since destroyed. Turns out it was sitting in this barn since about 2011, with critters getting in, rain getting in etc. In amongst the pipes and parts of this organ are numerous pipes and parts from other organs including a 31 rank Estey theatre organ (their 4th-largest theatre organ), plus Wurlitzer, Robert-Morton, Marr & Colton, Smith, and Welte pipes and parts, as well as some church pipes I have yet to identify. I presume they are from many different organs. Again, due both to the bad condition and nearly dead pipe organ market, all of this would have gone to scrap if I had not spent a lot of time and energy getting them. And now nearly everything will be in dry storage hopefully by tonight, except 4 blowers which I still need to go back and get another day. I will restore and keep the Geneva organ for myself, and Smith parts, and plan on restoring and reselling or gifting the other pipe ranks / chests / regulators to other organs / venues around the country. If (unlikely) it turns out the entire 31 ranks of the Estey theatre organ are in there, I will try to restore that too. My point is that there are lots of organs available for whoever wants one. Your point about the organ being so deeply associated with religion in general, and Christianity in particular, being a liability to the organ, is well taken. Also, many organists have tended to be provincial and musically conservative, which isn’t *always* a bad thing, but in terms of the future survival of their instrument, is proving to be. Many organists tend to be gay whereas many organ builders (at least in past times) tended to be straight and fairly conservative, as of course were most churches. This sowed the seeds of conflict, which were not helped by the pipe organ’s portrayal as a “villain’s instrument” in the good old bad old days of Hollywood and cinema/TV in general as well as in books. Between 1. the prevailing anti-gay teachings at the time scaring most organists deep into the closet and causing many to affect a catty or distant attitude due to the world treating them like s**t as people; and 2. the instrument being so large and so difficult to play as to intimidate the average person, and 3. the organ’s association with the church and liturgical music greatly influencing its musical use, with most composers very reluctant to write music for it outside of a liturgical or religious use, due to their perception of such uses being “disrespectful” or “sacreligious”, the organ kind of slowly went from a thoroughly mainstream instrument through the 1920s, and over time became a kind of outlier in the world of musical instruments. The AIDS crisis in the 1980s-1990s was another tremendous blow, as the organ community lost many great musicians, advocates for and historians of these instruments. This is too bad, since all of these anti-organ factors are combining to literally kill the pipe organ today. If people were less intimidated by the pipe organ, understood it better, and were more welcoming to and friendly towards organists (and vice versa), and were less reluctant to play ALL KINDS of music on it, besides primarily classical and liturgical music, the future outlook for the pipe organ would today be brighter.

[@andrewbarrett1537]

As for charity work, I have been not too great, but have been directly charitable to individuals begging on the street, usually tossing them an energy bar or bottle of water etc. That way, they can eat or drink directly. I don’t throw money because I don’t know whether the person has a drug or alcohol habit or not who might spend the money on that rather than food etc (and of course they still have the option to go sell the food to someone else to buy drugs etc), but having had many friends with drug problems, I know that most of these problems are caused by problems in the person’s life (abusive/evil family members, etc, past trauma) making it hard for them to get through life, so they turn to substances to feel better. This isn’t always the right thing to do but it is a very human thing to do. Some people are more susceptible to addiction than others, based on genetics and also the perceived hopelessness of their life situation. I support legalizing and regulating most drugs in order to financially cripple the big drug cartels that are murdering thousands of people in various countries and causing many others to flee for their lives, greatly increasing the immigration load on various countries. If drug production and sales were removed from the province of career criminals and put under regulation, and drug addiction destigmatized and more recovery help (without prosecution) widely available, I believe that both the cartels could be wiped out, and more addicts would get help (without fear of being put in prison), and fewer new addicts would be created by kids wanting to do drugs as something “cool” and “counter cultural”, as they would then be more ‘mainstream’ and prosaic, hopefully causing them to be less attractive to young rebellious people. I am not saying to PROMOTE drugs as being cool or attractive, at least those which are never good for people and have no real medicinal use (like cocaine, PCP, meth etc), but legalize them and treat them as something that is known dangerous but reluctantly allowed, like tobacco products. Another problem is mentally ill people being on the street when they need proper care and rehabilitation. One known problem in relation to that are the number of known evil/psychopathic people who go into the mental health profession and end up being overseers/managers etc at mental health facilities. There is almost no mechanism in place screening, vetting, or barring people from the mental health profession and as a consequence, there is a ton of abuse in this field, resulting in some mentally ill people avoiding these institutions altogether due to a justifiable fear of poor treatment. By the same token, people in various countries do not often look closely enough at candidates for office in terms of personality disorders before voting them in or letting them come to power, and so psychopaths are often elected who then wreak havoc upon their countries, turning them into dictatorships, killing lots of people, and causing yet more to flee for their lives (see: the European immigration crisis). Instead of directly dealing with / going to war with these leaders for ETHICAL purposes, in order to take them out of power and save the people of that country, many other world leaders either do not engage due to the threat of WW3 (which is a real threat), due to an isolationist / neutral or “me first” national policy, or else DO go to war, but to take more land/natural resources or else to topple another government which may or may not be a dictatorship, but which is perceived as hostile to the interests of the warring country (some actual democracies have been toppled in this way, which I think is bad and hypocritical on the part of other democracies). So, all these factors, mostly the fault of evil people in power being evil (and also of other people either hoodwinked or willing to stand by knowingly while they are being evil, and aid and abet them) get in the way of charitably helping others in far-flung parts of the world, as sometimes charities have been run out of countries altogether by a dictator, and in other cases, some charities themselves are corrupt or fake, essentially hoodwinking people in 1st world countries out of money in return for no or next to no help to people in 3rd world countries. These bad ‘charities’ give the good ones a bad name and can cause donors burned to think twice. In my opinion they also need to be shut down and put out of business, so the good charities can thrive and so donors are not confused and more money can actually go towards helping people. The government itself doing things like shutting things down, regulating them etc should itself not be above scrutiny, and voters should be more involved with local, state and federal governments, and pay very close attention to whom they’re electing, in terms of their ethics / personality and track record, rather than just taking all the rhetoric at face value. So, all this is why I prefer to selectively help actual people in front of my face rather than trust a group to have my money etc go in the right direction. If I had the know-how, cojones, spoke the language etc I could and would go to other countries and help there. But I can also see how help and the positive effects of help can be limited under a dictatorship, which is why I also advocate for better and more just governance of all countries. Even religion is not above these kinds of problems, as both Christianity and Islam have had various violent/extremist factions from time to time (or in a more absolute sense, one could refer to ethical Christians and Muslims as “real” Christians and Muslims and then to violent/hateful/bigoted ones as “fake” or “apostate” / “in name only” Christians and Muslims in terms of their behavior etc). Of course there are other problems with violent/fanatical “members” of other religions, but these two seem to be the most visible, at least in the USA. I am not advocating to blindly be against religion, as there are also violent/bigoted so-called “atheists” (who of course are not representative of all atheists), but this is to show that religion alone cannot always help in that bad people can use it as a cover or excuse for their bad actions. The Catholic Church molestation scandal, which has been decades or centuries in the making (and is certainly not limited to that denomination or religion) is another example, as are cults and also charismatic “church” leaders who ask for huge financial donations from others, none or almost none of which actually goes to help the poor, homeless etc. So while ministries/outreach done in a REAL truly religious/ethical way is definitely a good thing, one has to be careful and watch out for wolves in sheep’s clothing. But there are a lot of things on which people spend tons of money besides pipe organs: fancy boats, fancy cars etc so there are endless amounts of things on which one could throw their money away. At least a pipe organ, installed in a public place and not hidden away, has the potential to bring musical joy and pleasure to many many people, as well as being an instrument of artistic self-expression for many musicians. So while constantly replacing an old pipe organ with a new one in a church every few decades is wasteful and unnecessary (when the old one could be maintained in place), destroying ALL pipe organs thus produced (which used many natural resources to make) is doing a major disservice to the world in general, as well as being disrespectful of those natural resources. I liken it to factory farming using only part of an animal for the meat and throwing the rest away; vs Native American tribes (and other tribal peoples around the world, and certain more ethical hunters etc) using EVERY PART of the animal (or plant) respectfully, to do justice to the killing of that living thing so that its death is not in vain / not an unethical waste.

[@andrewbarrett1537]

“body no”, you’re assuming a lot of things about user “StopFear” based upon their posts. While you could do the better thing and debate their ARGUMENTS and stated positions, instead you choose to ASSUME QUITE A LOT about that user based upon next to no information given in their paragraph. That does not help your argument, after all: #1 you’re personally attacking them rather than debating their ideas; and #2 what if your assumptions you have made about then turn out to be wrong? Then half or more if your argument is rendered invalid and you have wasted time as have they in needing to reply to you to correct any errors. While it may be difficult, I try to treat commenters as politically neutral (unless they have explicitly stated otherwise and/or laid out their positions), and instead debate them based upon what they ACTUALLY WROTE. Anyway, I hope you find this useful, as it should save you (and others) a lot of time in the future.