Posted by Klaus on March 09, 2002 at 21:58:44:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Pedal? posted by Robert Coulter on March 09, 2002 at 21:13:33:
I do believe you, when you say, that these very low notes are tuned by your ears and those of other humans.
But I am less sure, that you are really hearing the fundamental of these very long organ pipes.
Some of the early digital tuners, had limits in the low range. Yet they could be used to tune low notes as long as the octave content of the overtone palette of these low notes were in tune with the fundamental of these notes (which of course is the situation with good players playing good instruments).
In a somewhat parallel way the human hearing is able to realise those very low organ pipes being brought to sound. This realisation is supported by the superior equalizer, that the human brain provides.
I am not convinced that the extremely low notes, that you line up, would be audible, if they only consisted of a sine wave at the frequency of their fundamental.
I do not have to tell an expert like you, that intonating an organ into a certain church or concert hall is very much a matter of playing up to the psycho-acoustic perception of humans. But I might out a slight hint, that even experts might be fooled by these psycho-acoustic factors.
That aside I might also doubt, that all humans have exactly the same lower limit for hearing pure sine waves. Those differences in that limit are obscured exactly by the fact, that pure sine waves a not very common in musical contexts. Which allows the human brain equalizers to compensate through the analysis of the overtone patterns.
I am sure, that you much better than I can explain the the fake 16' organ stops composed of simultaneously sounding 8' and 5 1/3' stops, that are used in some small churches like some of our rural churches from the middle ages. (The organs are from later eras).
In a brass context one can find the same effect used in old British brass band arrangements from back when the largest bass was an Eb bombardon. The Bb bass was just a renamed euph. To fool the public into the illusion of a contrabass tuba, the 2nd euph often played not the usual root of the final chord, but the fifth above the bombardon.
4th trombonists in 5 part trombone sections in big bands might have experienced to fulfill the same function.
This topic has a lot of aspects, but I will stop for now.
Klaus