Mike Raiford wrote:

> There is something about a big pipe organ with extremely low registers. 
> Occasionally at church they'll pull what I think is the 16' stop, and it 
> sounds incredible, there's something about that deep rumble the big 
> pipes put out...

On a normal church organ, 16' is the lowest available stop. This is due 
mainly to size considerations. (Not to mention that building large pipes 
requires a lot of metal, and therefore costs money.)

A cathedral organ, however, would usually have at least one 32' stop.

Exactly two pipe organs on the face of the Earth have a 64' stop. But 
then, really, that's not a note, it's a small earthquake! o_O

(I should maybe point out that a 16' stop doesn't necessarily contain 
any pipes that are 16' long. There are ways to make the pipes shorter 
[while muffling the tone they generate]. Or the stop might simply not 
contain all the notes of the scale; only the *lowest* pipe would need to 
be 16' long; the next just one octave up only needs to be _half_ that size!)

I leave it as an exercise for the over-interested reader to figure out 
what the fundamental frequency of a 32' pipe is. (Remember that the 
fundamental wavelength is 2x the pipe length - or 4x if it's a closed pipe!)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message