This page contains information about forthcoming articles on this website.

Winston E Kock

It is probable that few visitors to this website will recognise the name of Dr Winston E Kock (1909 - 1982).  Yet he invented the original and famous Baldwin analogue electronic organ before the second world war, an innovative design for its time which set the standard on which many others were based for several decades until they were finally displaced by digitals in the 1990's.  He was associated with some of the pioneers of electronic music in the 1930's, particularly in Germany, whose work led directly to Moog's synthesiser revolution of the 1960's.  He also composed music, held hundreds of patents, and was a prolific author both of technical books and novels.  Despite all this he remains best known to niches of the global electronics community in other areas, because he was also the Director of Acoustics Research at Bell Telephone Labs in the USA and subsequently became Director of NASA's Engineering Research Center.  Throughout a long and distinguished career he was associated with many of the great names in electronics, such as the Nobel prize winners Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley who invented the transistor.  Because of our interests here on this site, it seems appropriate that this forthcoming article will review his life and work, and particularly his contributions to the field of electronic organs.

All you ever wanted to know about loudspeakers

The reason why this article will appear on a website dedicated to organs is because of the importance of loudspeakers to both digital (electronic) and pipe organs.  The need for good loudspeakers in the case of digital organs is obvious, and with pipe organs their importance lies in the fact that we often listen to their music reproduced through our hi-fi systems.  Not only that, but an increasing number of pipe organs today incorporate digital stops in any case.

The article will consider virtually everything related to loudspeakers at a relatively simple level.  It debunks not only many myths, but also those who propagate them by degrading the disciplines of science and engineering.  Not only loudspeaker units themselves but their enclosures, crossovers (dividing networks), amplifiers, cables, the listening room, stereophony, surround sound and other topics will be covered.  A major aim of the article is to demonstrate that, although perfection is unachievable, selecting a good loudspeaker system is not nearly as difficult as those pundits dominated by ignorance and/or vested interests would have us believe.  Another way of saying the same thing is that pseudo-science, factoids and plain untruths are about as common in loudspeakers as they are in subjects such as homeopathy and nuclear power generation, where anyone (including celebrities and royalty) seem able to set themselves up as experts on the basis of no expertise whatever.

Age-related hearing loss and organ building

Age-related hearing loss eventually affects most of us, including those who think they are immune.  Among musical instrument technicians are piano tuners whose efforts at the top end of the keyboard are a travesty.  It is probable that there are also  organs which have shortcomings related to defective hearing on the part of the builders and voicers who made them.

This article uses data which show that measurable hearing loss occurs frequently by the time people have reached their late 40's and certainly once they are into the 50's and 60's.  Those who make a living by music can be more badly affected than the population at large.  It relates the data to the effects defective hearing could have on those in the organ building business, and hence on the organs they turn out.

How the reed pipe speaks

A popular article on this site (how the flue pipe speaks) discusses the physics of the organ flue pipe at a simple level.  This one will treat reed pipes in a similar manner.  Among other things, it emphasises the difference in function between the resonator tube in the two types of pipe - whereas a reed pipe will continue to emit some sort of reedy sound when bereft of its resonator, this is not true of the flue pipe.  Also the influence of parameters such as reed tongue curvature and the shape of the shallot opening on the emitted sound will be discussed. 

Wavelet Analysis of Organ Pipe Sounds

The sound emitted by an organ pipe evolves in time through three distinct regimes.  The first is the attack transient heard as the note is keyed, the second is the steady state sound which persists as long as the key is held, and the third is the transient as the key is released.  The character or timbre of the steady state tone is well described by its harmonic structure, which can be obtained easily by Fourier analysis.  However Fourier analysis, even using the short time Fourier transform (STFT), is not well suited to the rapidly changing character of the sound during the attack and release transients.  Such signals are better analysed using the wavelet analysis techniques developed over the last two decades.  These have now been applied to an enormous range of data encompassing electro-cardiograms to stock market analysis, and it is therefore surprising that they have seldom been tried on the transients emitted by organ pipes.  This article describes the results of applying wavelet analysis to transients and compares them with those obtained via conventional STFT methods.  It also discusses whether the much better time and frequency resolution obtained using wavelet processing can be applied effectively to digital simulations of organ pipe sounds.