5:09, ... That chord sounded EXACTLY like the train that used to pass by near my childhood home. As soon as you hit the notes my memory of that train came back to me so hard it almost hurt, ... lol.
As the daughter of someone who used to tune and install pipe organs I find it fascinating that this college has 34 pipe organs and a curator for them Bravo
Violinists and cellists play sharp and flat notes not only differently from each other, but also use even more subtle intonation, depending on the key of the piece and the character of the musical image.
Hey Vladimir, I was primarily self taught, but was able to study with a really great violinist: Theodora McMillan at U of Az, (first woman to play with the Cleveland Symphony). She never mentioned this and I have only become aware of it recently. Can you recommend some resources? I play along with Cello drones, but I could really use some further elucidation. Thanks, Jack
My violin teacher taught me to use different intonation depending on the direction of the phrase. If for example an F sharp is used in an ascending phrase, you'd play it slightly higher than if it's in a descending phrase. I think that because instruments with 4 strings are tuned in open fifths, when we're not playing with instruments with "tempered" tuning (like a piano), we naturally revert to playing different keys in different characters, resulting in more nuanced intonation. I have a feeling that this used to be more pronounced a few decades ago, and it's getting more popular to play stringed instruments with a standardized intonation because nuance is sometimes seen as being off pitch.
I played the clarinet and if I was playing something lyrical, I would often make the end of a phrase sound just an itsy bitsy bit lower, regardless of sharps and flats. Otherwise I don't think there was much difference, although I do remember (strangely) having a different grip for A depending on whether the key had sharps or flats.
The carillon in Nieuwpoort (Belgium) has 17 keys per octave. There are actually two rows of black keys. Remarkable is that it is a quite recent instrument, it dates from the 1950s. But the tuning is pythagorean, in which the difference between e.g. b flat and a sharp is only half as large as in the quarter-comma meantone tuning.
As an _a capellist_ -- this is like candy. The brightness of the last few seconds of this video ... breathtaking! And I take it that he's not exactly the organist, either. Very nice instrument! And I don't think everyone caught this, but this thing is at Oberlin College.
Nice explanation and performances! FWIW, the Brombaugh organ of Oberlin's Fairchild Chapel was installed in the summer of 1981, a couple months before I arrived as a freshman. Having never heard anything other than equal temperament before, I initially found its pure thirds sounded "out of tune" to me, but after having many lessons on it, practice sessions, and performances (mine and others'), I came to revel in the beauty of Renaissance and early Baroque music played on it. It is a jewel of an instrument in a beautiful acoustic setting.
That's funny - I had the opposite experience. My father had rebelled against being taught piano as a child, and as an adult he still considered pianos to be instruments of oppression. So instead my parents got us recorders - much cheaper of course - which I took to like a duck to water. But recorders are tuned with pure thirds. So when we stayed with my grandparents, I tried their piano, thought it sounded crap - it was years out of tune anyway - and didn't want anything to do with it. Instead I bought a guitar... that sounded wrong as well, but a bit less so, and I got used to equal temperament.
@@yadusolparterre Thank you. I have corrected it. I actually care about such things and appreciate your observation. It's nice to know that there are others who care too.
I remember playing this organ a couple years ago! Mr. Kasimir introduced me to several of the amazing organs at Oberlin. Really cool experience. I hope to play them again someday.
David is a wonderful curator. I had the privilege of hearing these instruments when my son in law was visiting from Austria and David took him around to all the Oberlin instruments as well as others in the greater NE Ohio area. This is truly a treasure trove of significant instruments. Thank you.
Thank you, as a cellist who plays with “split keys” known as a limitless fingerboard, I use this all the time in my playing and teaching. G# should be placed lower as a pitch than Ab, and in the key of G major B as the mediant ought to be played lower than it would be in A major as the supertonic.
Violinists and cellists play sharp and flat notes not only differently from each other, but also use even more subtle intonation, depending on the key of the piece and the nature of the musical image.
The old harmonium in St. Joseph's Oratory, St. Patrick's College in Maynooth had split sharps enabling the organist to play correctly in every chord. This instrument is now available to be seen in The Museum of Science and Ecclesiology at the University's South Campus.
You know you've been freed from 12-TET when you had euphoric shivers at 10:24 but the guy says "it's just out". Some intervals I can create still sound bad to me. But I really have grown to love weird intervals ourside 12TET. The way the harmonics shimmer against each other generates other perceived tones, that have their own relation not only to the notes being played, but perhaps the key center you're playing around. And changing a note by a couple HZ can dramatically change the more noticeable harmonics that I hear, and the way those frequencies relate to the fundamentals, and the key center can make extremely pleasing music to me.
Ahhhh I just heard the ending piece, and this organ in a church is an AMAZING example. With all those notes playing, you can really hear in the overtones. There's a portion where the fundamental seems "out" but if you just focus on the shimmering harmonics, it just sounds so nice and in tune with the harmonics of the chord that he resolves too. I'm about to cry it was so beautiful.
@@Dude8718Wording it as if it were a demonic entity that has people entrapped is weird (12 TET is, after all, one of the most consistent and practical tuning systems), but microtonality does have some wonderful, unique sounds.
@@hahhey1372and I agree 12-TET is insanely useful but when I'm composing music I am extremely anal about intervals and I play open tunings on guitar and I will literally tune my guitar different for different pieces, and only use specific strings for a certain note to ensure the most resonant and rich harmonics that I can. Which is not usually equal temperament. Some chords that I really love in some contexts sound gross with their 12 TET approximations. When I listen to others playing, it doesn't bother me as much because as long as the movement revolves around the key center my brain can make do. But when I'm the one playing, I just don't like the sound of some intervals and chords, like the major third being out of tune, and if I want a certain chord to be extremely resonant I'll tune my guitar to be best like that but sacrifice other intervals on that string. Sometimes I also account for being able to bend the string on some notes. It's weird but it's just how I naturally liked to do things. It has its own limitations as you can obviously see, but it works with the way I like to play solo guitar. When it comes to keeping your band in tune, 12 TET makes things much easier. I'm just really obsessive about the shimmering harmonics and if a note is a couple cents off the just interval it can completely change the timbre to me if the harmonics aren't lining up just right.
I had no idea these existed. And i got through my bachelor's. I wish they had mentioned the time period during which the music for this organ was composed.
Sound heals or destroys. This is a perfect example of that. I can feel the difference in my body when hearing these chords playing. Thank you for the demonstration. 🙏🏻☮️❤️
It’s also interesting that the tonality is a half step _higher_ than what it tends to be today. (‘A’ here is our A#.) This is the opposite of period practice, which is a half step lower than what it tends to be today.
Not exactly. Historically, many organs sounded higher than our modern pitch because many places wanted to save money on their organs, so they built shorter pipes which necessarily generates a higher pitch. There was no standardized pitch for anything until a certain point in the nineteenth century, and even what we today consider “historic” pitch is really an approximation based off of modern pitch! Bach, Handel, Mozart and Haydn all had tuning forks at A=421 (based on later computations of the frequencies), but that was generally used for the harpsichords and pianos. Up until 1711, when the tuning fork was invented, people had different ideas about what proper pitch was, and two different organs in the same town could be at different pitches. The same could be said for other keyboard instruments and even choirs and other instrumental ensembles.
In Bachs Weimar cantatas the woodwinds are written a whole tone higher than the organ. That is because the organ, and the string insrtruments, were tuned in "Chorton", just as this organ, and many other historical organs, while the woordwinds played in "Kammerton". There was no generally agreed tuning standard back then, but In period practice today, Kammerton usually has A=415, while Chorton uses A=466. Those pitches are conveniently the same as G♯ and B♭ in A=440, so that one can handliy shift the (organ, or haspsichord) keyboard to play in "historical" tunings. That is all there is to it, really, nobody ever claimed that A=415 is historically accurate (though close enough to the A=420 that _was_ common in the 18th century, as @matthewbuller notes)
@@matthewbuller6835 This is exactly the explanation I was looking for. It also throws cold water on some of the hype about period practice. Thanks very much!
For anyone who wants to really dig in on what frequency A was at various times and in various places, Bruce Haynes' "Performing Pitch: The Story of 'A'" is a must read!
What I would like Mr. Kurzweil to do is to create an electronic piano keyboard that would optimize on the fly temperament for the best native sound interval while it is played!
Yes, I've thought about that since last year. In fact, any one of the modern synths manufacturers could easily add that to their products that offer multiple choices of tuning.
@@altair7001 My Korg Prologue 16 has the possibility of microtuning buried in the depth of its menus. You can save each sound preset with its own micro tuning.
@@66superfly Yes, many keyboards have that option but what we're talking about here is having the keyboard automatically choose the correct tuning of each note individually, depending on the chord being played, so there are never any dissonances in any chords.
The upper manual has only an 8' Regal, plus a treble Nasat. The reasoning is that if one ever needed D#s or Abs on the Regal, it's a simple matter to retune those pipes -- then just not use the Nasat with it. BTW, the upper manual does not couple to the lower.
@BramVanhooydonck if you're a choir playing with a piano, singing like this will sound worse than 12TET. However, acapella choirs almost exclusively sing in just intonation, which is much better than even the intonation of the organ
@loganricherson3749 Nobody learns to sing with just intonation. It's always checked based on instruments, usually a piano. Any other intonation would have to be communicated and aimed for. Some pieces will cause singers to change intonation throughout based on the relation between notes, usually unintentionally but some rare cases will have this written out explicitly.
@BramVanhooydonck that's my point, it doesn't need to be written out explicitly. All that this turning system does is change the relationship between the notes to be a compromise with fixed pitches. An accapella choir adjusts the intervals subconsciously to fit in with the intonation without needing to specify it. No need to have a fixed set of pitches that works in every (or most) keys when when singing
Ok am I the only one here who has perfect pitch for whom the entire organ sounds about a semitone sharp (at least compared to the standard a440 tuning we're used to)? Like at 2:26 when he plays middle-C I hear C-sharp. Is it just me?
I don't have perfect pitch, and it might very well not be A440. That's a relatively modern idea anyway, so it might not adhere to that standard. Historically we didn't have a way to accurately measure frequency, so it was just 'somewhere around here'. And as long as you made sure that everyone played in the same tuning, it didn't really matter anyway what A is. Since he's talking about baroque music, that would be well before the standard tuning of A440. In fact almost all old organs (one of the few instruments we know the pitch of centuries later, since well, no way to know how they tuned their violas back then) are significantly lower pitched than A440. It's quite interesting that this one is apparently tuned sharper it seems. I'm pretty sure that it doesn't have to do with audio compression. While I work in IT I'm in no way an expert on audio compression, but I'm 99% certain it doesn't change the base pitch. It changes the complexity of the sound, so you might lose some of the more complex harmonics or timbre, but the tone frequency shouldn't change. I've never heard of a single compression method that does that.
There's a line in The Goonies where I could swear the girl says, "I can't tell if this is an A# or a Bb," and I thought that was a goof in the script, but now...perhaps not. She was playing some kind of pipe organ made out of bones, so I suppose it wouldn't have been a surprise for it to have an odd tuning. I'd have said, "Stuff it. A# and Bb are the same note!"...and we would have all died because I'd never heard of quarter comma meantone.
Great stuff. I have no idea why I never played around with these things while I was at Oberlin. What's the reason for putting G# on the front, when the other two sharps are on the back? Isn't this harder to remember?
That all the notes were different in frequency used to be the standard, hence the different names as they were approaching up or down from different tones. Beautiful organ and good explanations. Sadly, this isn’t really taught as somehow there is a believe, these topics are only of interest to experienced players. I can’t even recall how often I heard the question why there is a need for two different names for seemingly one single key and I’m not even a music teacher (yet). Also a tad bit sad that this (cultural) practice is somewhat being lost. Thanks for the video!
It seems there would be some key signatures that just wouldn't work on that layout. Like if you wanted to transpose from C to Bb, you'd have to find a different church. Maybe even change religions.
If you start with any key near the bottom end of the keyboard, for example a C and go up by a fifth you get to G. That G "should" be tuned to be 1 1/2 times the frequency of the starting note C. If it isn't then you get a beating sound when they're played together, called a wolf. If you repeat this a total of 12 times, going up a fifth each time, you eventually end up back on a C. But this gives a mathematical problem: Consecutive C's need to be an octave apart, ie. each one needs to be twice the frequency of the one on its left. The problem is that 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 .... etc. (12 of them) does not quite equal 2 x 2 x 2 .... etc. (7 of them). The first comes to about 129.75 and the second 128. So something has to give. In the equal temperament scale, the frequencies of the fifths are adjusted slightly away from the ideal 1.5:1 ratio. The result is that everything sounds okayish - neither perfect nor terrible. But it's a compromise and we're so used to it that most of the time we don't even notice. It also means that we can play in any key and each key sounds similarly okayish. But it's not the only possible compromise. There are about half a dozen compromises, of which quarter comma meantone is just one. Most of these compromises make one or more keys perfect at the expense of some of the other keys. So if you want to play in a different key, you have to retune the instrument, which of course is a pain. My electric piano defaults to equal temperament, but at the press of a few buttons can be retuned to quarter comma meantone and a few other systems - the wonders of modern electronics!
For equal tempered instruments, C♯ and D♭ are functionally identical. You will press the same key and get the same sound regardless of the note assigned.
@@sinopulence I must be confused because I thought the point of this organ is that it *wasn’t* equal temperament. The other pitches are *not* being treated as the same pitch (as in equal temperament), hence the split sharps.
I’m sure in real life it sounds great, but the whole organ is a half step too high. So when I hear those different temperaments it sounds like two slightly out of tune white keys. I’m gonna give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say it’s a glitch in the recording. However I find it quite remarkable that even when it is a half step too high, the chords sound right (when he plays the correct keys) even if both temperaments sound slightly out of tune when played alone. I don’t think it would sound out of a tune alone either if it was the right pitch though.
There’s a band called King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard that’s made 3 albums with 24 notes per octave. Flying Microtonal Banana, K.G., and L.W.. You should check them out to see what you think of it.
5:09, ... That chord sounded EXACTLY like the train that used to pass by near my childhood home. As soon as you hit the notes my memory of that train came back to me so hard it almost hurt, ... lol.
You beat me to it. Hmm. Maybe that’s on purpose to get our attention?
I immidietly thought the same when I heard it, it sounds just like a train horn
Music can trigger some pretty impresive memories that may or may not have been long forgotten. Music is amazing.
I like trains!
@@League-of-Losers It’s embedded in our DNA, like speech.
As the daughter of someone who used to tune and install pipe organs I find it fascinating that this college has 34 pipe organs and a curator for them Bravo
Beautiful organ and church. It blows my mind that this college has 34 organs
Where is this college located? Is it over in Europe or here in the USA ?
Retired piano tuner/technician here. How excellent to see different temperaments being fully understood, used and cherished. 😊
Really glad you retired.
@@karlrschneiderdamn 🗿
Violinists and cellists play sharp and flat notes not only differently from each other, but also use even more subtle intonation, depending on the key of the piece and the character of the musical image.
Hey Vladimir, I was primarily self taught, but was able to study with a really great violinist: Theodora McMillan at U of Az, (first woman to play with the Cleveland Symphony). She never mentioned this and I have only become aware of it recently. Can you recommend some resources? I play along with Cello drones, but I could really use some further elucidation. Thanks, Jack
My violin teacher taught me to use different intonation depending on the direction of the phrase. If for example an F sharp is used in an ascending phrase, you'd play it slightly higher than if it's in a descending phrase.
I think that because instruments with 4 strings are tuned in open fifths, when we're not playing with instruments with "tempered" tuning (like a piano), we naturally revert to playing different keys in different characters, resulting in more nuanced intonation.
I have a feeling that this used to be more pronounced a few decades ago, and it's getting more popular to play stringed instruments with a standardized intonation because nuance is sometimes seen as being off pitch.
Having learned the violin first, I'm forever frustrated at the guitar for always feeling slightly out of tune!
So true. Cellist and classical vocalist here. Singing with a piano is one of the most frustrating things in the world.
I played the clarinet and if I was playing something lyrical, I would often make the end of a phrase sound just an itsy bitsy bit lower, regardless of sharps and flats. Otherwise I don't think there was much difference, although I do remember (strangely) having a different grip for A depending on whether the key had sharps or flats.
The carillon in Nieuwpoort (Belgium) has 17 keys per octave. There are actually two rows of black keys. Remarkable is that it is a quite recent instrument, it dates from the 1950s. But the tuning is pythagorean, in which the difference between e.g. b flat and a sharp is only half as large as in the quarter-comma meantone tuning.
As an _a capellist_ -- this is like candy.
The brightness of the last few seconds of this video ... breathtaking! And I take it that he's not exactly the organist, either. Very nice instrument! And I don't think everyone caught this, but this thing is at Oberlin College.
This is a great demonstration of temperament. This organ sounds wonderful.
Nice explanation and performances! FWIW, the Brombaugh organ of Oberlin's Fairchild Chapel was installed in the summer of 1981, a couple months before I arrived as a freshman. Having never heard anything other than equal temperament before, I initially found its pure thirds sounded "out of tune" to me, but after having many lessons on it, practice sessions, and performances (mine and others'), I came to revel in the beauty of Renaissance and early Baroque music played on it. It is a jewel of an instrument in a beautiful acoustic setting.
That's funny - I had the opposite experience. My father had rebelled against being taught piano as a child, and as an adult he still considered pianos to be instruments of oppression. So instead my parents got us recorders - much cheaper of course - which I took to like a duck to water. But recorders are tuned with pure thirds. So when we stayed with my grandparents, I tried their piano, thought it sounded crap - it was years out of tune anyway - and didn't want anything to do with it. Instead I bought a guitar... that sounded wrong as well, but a bit less so, and I got used to equal temperament.
What an exceptionally beautiful chapel to complement the organ.
Complement, not compliment
@@yadusolparterre 🤓👆
@@yadusolparterre Thank you. I have corrected it. I actually care about such things and appreciate your observation. It's nice to know that there are others who care too.
I've never heard someone speak about an organ with precision. I learned something
Wow. Thank you for this. I’d never heard a real world representation of all of this tonal theory. Awesome. 🙏🏽
I remember playing this organ a couple years ago! Mr. Kasimir introduced me to several of the amazing organs at Oberlin. Really cool experience. I hope to play them again someday.
David is a wonderful curator. I had the privilege of hearing these instruments when my son in law was visiting from Austria and David took him around to all the Oberlin instruments as well as others in the greater NE Ohio area. This is truly a treasure trove of significant instruments. Thank you.
This is a great discussion and demonstration, and the song at the end sounds incredible.
So many things to enjoy in this video, the crisp versus the creepy, both make such a mesmerizing adventure
Fascinating video. Thanks for setting up this demonstration.
Bravo! Best and clearest explanation of this I've seen.
Thank you, as a cellist who plays with “split keys” known as a limitless fingerboard, I use this all the time in my playing and teaching. G# should be placed lower as a pitch than Ab, and in the key of G major B as the mediant ought to be played lower than it would be in A major as the supertonic.
Thank you, I am learning the viola, and I am aware of the point you make, but reproducing the fine distinction is another matter.
Violinists and cellists play sharp and flat notes not only differently from each other, but also use even more subtle intonation, depending on the key of the piece and the nature of the musical image.
I'm a recorder player and baroque flautist. We can also play split notes with alternative fingerings and lip adjustment.
What a great video explaining extended 1/4 comma meantone! And curator of organs an Oberlin sounds like a dream job!
Fascinating! What an amazing instrument and illuminating illustration with regard to temperament: bravo!
The old harmonium in St. Joseph's Oratory, St. Patrick's College in Maynooth had split sharps enabling the organist to play correctly in every chord.
This instrument is now available to be seen in The Museum of Science and Ecclesiology at the University's South Campus.
This was absolutely fascinating and I hope I never have to play on a keyboard like that! lol. Wow ! 34 organs at one place- how wonderful!
Very well explained. Beautiful church with a nice mini instrument downstairs.......
You know you've been freed from 12-TET when you had euphoric shivers at 10:24 but the guy says "it's just out". Some intervals I can create still sound bad to me. But I really have grown to love weird intervals ourside 12TET. The way the harmonics shimmer against each other generates other perceived tones, that have their own relation not only to the notes being played, but perhaps the key center you're playing around. And changing a note by a couple HZ can dramatically change the more noticeable harmonics that I hear, and the way those frequencies relate to the fundamentals, and the key center can make extremely pleasing music to me.
Ahhhh I just heard the ending piece, and this organ in a church is an AMAZING example. With all those notes playing, you can really hear in the overtones. There's a portion where the fundamental seems "out" but if you just focus on the shimmering harmonics, it just sounds so nice and in tune with the harmonics of the chord that he resolves too. I'm about to cry it was so beautiful.
@@Dude8718Wording it as if it were a demonic entity that has people entrapped is weird (12 TET is, after all, one of the most consistent and practical tuning systems), but microtonality does have some wonderful, unique sounds.
@@hahhey1372I am being facetious mostly 😅
@@hahhey1372and I agree 12-TET is insanely useful but when I'm composing music I am extremely anal about intervals and I play open tunings on guitar and I will literally tune my guitar different for different pieces, and only use specific strings for a certain note to ensure the most resonant and rich harmonics that I can. Which is not usually equal temperament. Some chords that I really love in some contexts sound gross with their 12 TET approximations. When I listen to others playing, it doesn't bother me as much because as long as the movement revolves around the key center my brain can make do. But when I'm the one playing, I just don't like the sound of some intervals and chords, like the major third being out of tune, and if I want a certain chord to be extremely resonant I'll tune my guitar to be best like that but sacrifice other intervals on that string. Sometimes I also account for being able to bend the string on some notes. It's weird but it's just how I naturally liked to do things.
It has its own limitations as you can obviously see, but it works with the way I like to play solo guitar. When it comes to keeping your band in tune, 12 TET makes things much easier. I'm just really obsessive about the shimmering harmonics and if a note is a couple cents off the just interval it can completely change the timbre to me if the harmonics aren't lining up just right.
I had no idea these existed. And i got through my bachelor's.
I wish they had mentioned the time period during which the music for this organ was composed.
Sound heals or destroys. This is a perfect example of that. I can feel the difference in my body when hearing these chords playing. Thank you for the demonstration. 🙏🏻☮️❤️
Very nice video.
Cool to see different rare instruments.
Imagine playing Firth of Fifth by Genesis on this organ!!
Oh man, now I want to hear that. Somebody ring Tony Banks!
You can find prog fans anywhere! Much love guys!
I tried learning it a few months ago, it's harder than it sounds!
I heard “Oberlin” and was stunned to learn I live in the same metropolitan area as this organ.
It’s also interesting that the tonality is a half step _higher_ than what it tends to be today. (‘A’ here is our A#.) This is the opposite of period practice, which is a half step lower than what it tends to be today.
Not exactly. Historically, many organs sounded higher than our modern pitch because many places wanted to save money on their organs, so they built shorter pipes which necessarily generates a higher pitch. There was no standardized pitch for anything until a certain point in the nineteenth century, and even what we today consider “historic” pitch is really an approximation based off of modern pitch! Bach, Handel, Mozart and Haydn all had tuning forks at A=421 (based on later computations of the frequencies), but that was generally used for the harpsichords and pianos. Up until 1711, when the tuning fork was invented, people had different ideas about what proper pitch was, and two different organs in the same town could be at different pitches. The same could be said for other keyboard instruments and even choirs and other instrumental ensembles.
In Bachs Weimar cantatas the woodwinds are written a whole tone higher than the organ. That is because the organ, and the string insrtruments, were tuned in "Chorton", just as this organ, and many other historical organs, while the woordwinds played in "Kammerton". There was no generally agreed tuning standard back then, but In period practice today, Kammerton usually has A=415, while Chorton uses A=466. Those pitches are conveniently the same as G♯ and B♭ in A=440, so that one can handliy shift the (organ, or haspsichord) keyboard to play in "historical" tunings. That is all there is to it, really, nobody ever claimed that A=415 is historically accurate (though close enough to the A=420 that _was_ common in the 18th century, as @matthewbuller notes)
@@matthewbuller6835 This is exactly the explanation I was looking for. It also throws cold water on some of the hype about period practice. Thanks very much!
E and A flat sounds like a train whistle!
For anyone who wants to really dig in on what frequency A was at various times and in various places, Bruce Haynes' "Performing Pitch: The Story of 'A'" is a must read!
Fascinating, thank you. What a great teaching tool.
Jacob Collier would be so happy with this instrument!
What I would like Mr. Kurzweil to do is to create an electronic piano keyboard that would optimize on the fly temperament for the best native sound interval while it is played!
Yes, I've thought about that since last year. In fact, any one of the modern synths manufacturers could easily add that to their products that offer multiple choices of tuning.
@@altair7001 My Korg Prologue 16 has the possibility of microtuning buried in the depth of its menus. You can save each sound preset with its own micro tuning.
@@66superfly Yes, many keyboards have that option but what we're talking about here is having the keyboard automatically choose the correct tuning of each note individually, depending on the chord being played, so there are never any dissonances in any chords.
@@altair7001 Now I get it. Great Idea.
That decision should be left to the human artist. It’s a subjective decision and should not be yielded to an “intelligent” instrument.
I really want to see the pedals 😮
But apparently no split keys on the upper manual - or is it just the camera angle? Please someone explain how that fits with the lower.
The upper manual has only an 8' Regal, plus a treble Nasat. The reasoning is that if one ever needed D#s or Abs on the Regal, it's a simple matter to retune those pipes -- then just not use the Nasat with it. BTW, the upper manual does not couple to the lower.
I would like to hear a Hindustani Harmonium player perform on this instrument!
amazing, but why such small key
That octave climb with 15 notes was so stressful
I knew I recognized those stop labels! Man, I miss playing on John's organs.
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing 👍
Ah, the wolf peaking in at 5:58! There's a reason you don't play in Ab in 1/4 meantone!
At 4:28 Philip Glass "Floe" started in my head ...
Nice catch.
Have to try my just intonation setting again now that I figured out when keys implicitly change and when they don't
Wow! Such an interesting video. Throughly enjoyable!!!
Thanks. I appreciate the explanation and demonstration.
I really quite liked the C D# G minor triad - sounded really nice to ears. Not sure why.
I wish vocalists and choirs would learn this intonation in addition to 12TET
They do, it's done unconsciously usually
@loganricherson3749 Most singers learn tonality based on what the instruments play, and will be corrected based on that, so I don't think it is
@BramVanhooydonck if you're a choir playing with a piano, singing like this will sound worse than 12TET. However, acapella choirs almost exclusively sing in just intonation, which is much better than even the intonation of the organ
@loganricherson3749 Nobody learns to sing with just intonation. It's always checked based on instruments, usually a piano. Any other intonation would have to be communicated and aimed for. Some pieces will cause singers to change intonation throughout based on the relation between notes, usually unintentionally but some rare cases will have this written out explicitly.
@BramVanhooydonck that's my point, it doesn't need to be written out explicitly. All that this turning system does is change the relationship between the notes to be a compromise with fixed pitches. An accapella choir adjusts the intervals subconsciously to fit in with the intonation without needing to specify it. No need to have a fixed set of pitches that works in every (or most) keys when when singing
In equal temperament we have the "perfect fifth", on this organ would there be "perfect thirds"
Sort of like the quarter tone Trumpet used by trumpeter Don Ellis.
Ok am I the only one here who has perfect pitch for whom the entire organ sounds about a semitone sharp (at least compared to the standard a440 tuning we're used to)?
Like at 2:26 when he plays middle-C I hear C-sharp.
Is it just me?
I can hear it as well, but l think it has something to do with the signal compression during uploading.
I don't have perfect pitch, and it might very well not be A440. That's a relatively modern idea anyway, so it might not adhere to that standard. Historically we didn't have a way to accurately measure frequency, so it was just 'somewhere around here'. And as long as you made sure that everyone played in the same tuning, it didn't really matter anyway what A is. Since he's talking about baroque music, that would be well before the standard tuning of A440. In fact almost all old organs (one of the few instruments we know the pitch of centuries later, since well, no way to know how they tuned their violas back then) are significantly lower pitched than A440. It's quite interesting that this one is apparently tuned sharper it seems. I'm pretty sure that it doesn't have to do with audio compression. While I work in IT I'm in no way an expert on audio compression, but I'm 99% certain it doesn't change the base pitch. It changes the complexity of the sound, so you might lose some of the more complex harmonics or timbre, but the tone frequency shouldn't change. I've never heard of a single compression method that does that.
It’s closer to 460 than 440
@@georgenahodil23video/audio conpression won't change pitch. This organ is just tuned around a semitone sharp from A 440
@@tristanwh9466 you are correct. I am speaking of the digital compression that happens (of the entire file) when it's uploaded to UT.
Lovely. What was the last piece?
I've often heard of this, but I hadn't ever seen one
Fascinating!
There's a line in The Goonies where I could swear the girl says, "I can't tell if this is an A# or a Bb," and I thought that was a goof in the script, but now...perhaps not. She was playing some kind of pipe organ made out of bones, so I suppose it wouldn't have been a surprise for it to have an odd tuning. I'd have said, "Stuff it. A# and Bb are the same note!"...and we would have all died because I'd never heard of quarter comma meantone.
Was that organ piece called 'Night Mythica' by Samuel Shite?
Very cool!
What tuning is the whole organ in general? It’s higher than 440 hz.
How do the Keys C#/Db and F#/Gb fit into this scheme?
Can you play in C# or Db Major or F# or Gb Major without bad intonation?
Great narrator voice :D
Also, what was the piece at the very end?
Great stuff. I have no idea why I never played around with these things while I was at Oberlin. What's the reason for putting G# on the front, when the other two sharps are on the back? Isn't this harder to remember?
G# is in the front because it’s more common than Ab in music of the time !
That's so cool!
What song is played at the end of the video?
I have a new appreciate of equal temperament
5:11...made me look in my rear view mirror!!!
Does the pedal board also use split tuning?
That would be fun to play 👍🏻
Yes.
The 10:17 chord actually sounds in-tune and crisp, but it's even gloomier than a minor triad
*_Fascinatin'!_*
Love this!
That was interesting. Thank you.
You know you're at civilization's end when you see 32K views on a video about D# and Eb being different notes. Enjoy the day while you can.
Its actually analogous to some people thinking society is at a peak where others believe it to be in a fall.
5:13 Somebody’s parked on the railroad tracks again.
That's amazing
So playing in Ab or Db you have to chromatically transpose and F# major is also off limits
Right. Of course, the repertory intended for this organ would never use those distant tonalities.
equal temperament vs just intonation?
No
What's the specialized tuning machine?!
damn that's beautiful
Is the difference a pipe organ problem? I play a Privia, I've never heard any flatness.
Kirnberger lives!
That all the notes were different in frequency used to be the standard, hence the different names as they were approaching up or down from different tones. Beautiful organ and good explanations. Sadly, this isn’t really taught as somehow there is a believe, these topics are only of interest to experienced players. I can’t even recall how often I heard the question why there is a need for two different names for seemingly one single key and I’m not even a music teacher (yet). Also a tad bit sad that this (cultural) practice is somewhat being lost. Thanks for the video!
Are the keys shorter and narrower than one would expect? Or is that an illusion caused by the camera angle or the organist has large hands?
Is e-flat higher than d-sharp? I thought it was the contrary ;-)
It seems there would be some key signatures that just wouldn't work on that layout. Like if you wanted to transpose from C to Bb, you'd have to find a different church. Maybe even change religions.
I’m guessing he mentioned Samuel Scheidt, not how his surname was spelled in the transcript…
What is a quarter komma meantone? I am a layman on music theory.
If you start with any key near the bottom end of the keyboard, for example a C and go up by a fifth you get to G. That G "should" be tuned to be 1 1/2 times the frequency of the starting note C. If it isn't then you get a beating sound when they're played together, called a wolf. If you repeat this a total of 12 times, going up a fifth each time, you eventually end up back on a C. But this gives a mathematical problem: Consecutive C's need to be an octave apart, ie. each one needs to be twice the frequency of the one on its left. The problem is that 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 .... etc. (12 of them) does not quite equal 2 x 2 x 2 .... etc. (7 of them). The first comes to about 129.75 and the second 128.
So something has to give. In the equal temperament scale, the frequencies of the fifths are adjusted slightly away from the ideal 1.5:1 ratio. The result is that everything sounds okayish - neither perfect nor terrible. But it's a compromise and we're so used to it that most of the time we don't even notice. It also means that we can play in any key and each key sounds similarly okayish.
But it's not the only possible compromise. There are about half a dozen compromises, of which quarter comma meantone is just one. Most of these compromises make one or more keys perfect at the expense of some of the other keys. So if you want to play in a different key, you have to retune the instrument, which of course is a pain. My electric piano defaults to equal temperament, but at the press of a few buttons can be retuned to quarter comma meantone and a few other systems - the wonders of modern electronics!
Thank you very much for this explanation!@@chrisengland5523
What are C4 and/or A4 tuned to on this organ? C4 sounds approx. one whole note higher than a naive listener would expect.
As subscriber # 206 I have a simple comment; Subscribe! BTW the exclamation point should be read in German as JSB would.
I thought it looked familiar!
How interesting
how does this work
I need this organ! Where can I buy it? ;)
I have one for sale. Also a bridge.
Interesting.
Wow!
Why would there be 34 pipe organs at a college that small?? I don't get it.
Maybe it's a college that specializes in organ music studies...
Oh hey my brother goes to this college
Why no splitting between C#/Db or F#/Gb?
For equal tempered instruments, C♯ and D♭ are functionally identical. You will press the same key and get the same sound regardless of the note assigned.
Same as F# and Gb
@@sinopulence I must be confused because I thought the point of this organ is that it *wasn’t* equal temperament. The other pitches are *not* being treated as the same pitch (as in equal temperament), hence the split sharps.
@spb7883 you're right, I think that these 2 notes maybe always the same note even when not equal temp.
@@sinopulence 🤷♂️. Either way, cool stuff.
I’m sure in real life it sounds great, but the whole organ is a half step too high. So when I hear those different temperaments it sounds like two slightly out of tune white keys. I’m gonna give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say it’s a glitch in the recording. However I find it quite remarkable that even when it is a half step too high, the chords sound right (when he plays the correct keys) even if both temperaments sound slightly out of tune when played alone. I don’t think it would sound out of a tune alone either if it was the right pitch though.
My perfect pitch 144hz ears reaaaalllyyyyy didn't like this. Different temperaments drive me crazy.
There’s a band called King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard that’s made 3 albums with 24 notes per octave. Flying Microtonal Banana, K.G., and L.W.. You should check them out to see what you think of it.
34 organs!
❤️♥️❤️!