Organ pipes - A physicist's view

Abstract

Pipe organs have been part of the musical life of Western Europe for more than one thousand years, and the basic design and construction of organ pipes has varied little over most of that period. It would be reasonable to expect, therefore, that all the details of the way in which they produce sound would be well understood. Surprisingly, this is not so, and it is only in the past 30 years of so that even the basic air-jet mechanism has been thoroughly studied. A detailed discussion is given in reference [l], which shows what we now understand reasonably reliably, and what remains to be done. Show more