On 4/30/2010 10:52 AM, Darren New wrote:

> Closer to 10Hz. Between 10Hz and 20Hz, you detect sufficiently loud
> sound with different organs, such as your eyeballs vibrating or your
> sinuses resonating. If you play a tone in that range, you get the
> "spooky" feeling, or unaccountably sad, or mystical feelings, or things
> like that, depending on the frequency.

I know with my headphones (Hybrid canalphones, actually) I can detect 
down to around 10hz, anything lower is inaudible. I designed my 
headphone amp with a ~15hz corner frequency high pass in it's input 
stage (AC coupling, to get rid of any DC bias before feeding the signal 
to the op-amp)

It sounds beautiful, very rich tones.

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...

-- 
~Mike

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> There is something about a big pipe organ with extremely low registers. 

That "something about" is exactly what I'm talking about. :-) That's the 
subsonics kicking in.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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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*

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