Klarinet Archive - Posting 000660.txt from 2001/02

From: Bill Hausmann <bhausmann1@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] The straight path of the audio engineer
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2001 20:11:42 -0500

At 10:01 PM 2/17/2001 +0000, Tony Pay wrote:
>On Sat, 17 Feb 2001 16:58:30 -0500, bhausmann1@-----.com said:
>
> > Just as a system can be designed to MIMIMIZE these non-linearities,
> > could not one be designed to MAXIMIZE them? I think that is, in fact,
> > what the resultant bass stop does.
>
>Where might this maximising system be located?
>
>Have you tried to find out? The idea is to learn something.
>
>I said in a previous post that perhaps there might be some sort of
>electronic device that helped this, and searching a relevant
>mailing-list archive:
>
>http://www.albany.edu/piporg-l/
>
>...suggested, though weakly, that that might, in fact, have been tried.
>
>On the other hand, most of the other stuff there seemed to suggest that
>resultant stops weren't considered so satisfactory, on the whole.

Thanks for the reference, Tony. It does appear that opinion is divided on
this organ list about resultants, but it looks like there are a LOT of
organs out there that have them, mostly 32', but one person listed 37 known
organs with 64' resultant bass stops, 4 in Britain, and there were mentions
of even LOWER ones (128', etc.)! Some people think it is purely a
psychoacoustic phenomenon, resulting from the brain constructing a
fundamental tone to match the harmonic structure created by the two pipes a
fifth apart. Others wonder why items in the church suddenly begin to
vibrate when excited by the supposedly psychologically created
illusion. For something that has been built so often and for so long, it
is rather poorly understood! While it seems there ARE some electronic
versions of resultant basses extant, the Liverpool Cathedral version is
clearly NOT one of those.

One of the problems I think we are facing in this discussion is that the
pitches we are talking about are OUTSIDE the range of human hearing. They
are FELT rather than heard. Actually, even the 32' CCCC, at 16 Hz, is at
the VERY ragged edge of the normal hearing range. We usually hear only the
harmonics of even these notes and construct the fundamentals in our
ears/brains. But the fundamental IS actually THERE. We just can't sense
it with the auditory equipment God gave us.

>Still, you tell us, Bill. It's your pigeon.
>
>But, apart from that, you're onboard, then?

If it were not so reproduceable in recording... I can possibly even
accept that the fundamental is psychoacoustically HEARD, but I'm not so
sure that the fundamental that is FELT is not REAL.

Bill Hausmann bhausmann1@-----.com
451 Old Orchard Drive http://homepages.go.com/~zoot14/zoot14.html
Essexville, MI 48732 ICQ UIN 4862265

If you have to mic a saxophone, the rest of the band is TOO LOUD!

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe from Klarinet, e-mail: klarinet-unsubscribe@-----.org
Subscribe to the Digest: klarinet-digest-subscribe@-----.org
Additional commands: klarinet-help@-----.org
Other problems: klarinet-owner@-----.org

   
     Copyright © Woodwind.Org, Inc. All Rights Reserved    Privacy Policy    Contact charette@woodwind.org