Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Organ failure

Lincoln College organ by Elmar Eye
Lincoln College organ, a photo by Elmar Eye on Flickr.
Music in the chapel at Lincoln College, Oxford used to be supplied by this modest organ by Harrison and Harrison of Durham, but was replaced in 2010 by a new one by William Drake. The old one was a bit undersized and the sound would die from lack of air if too many of the stops were pulled. When I was a student at the college I used to enjoy listening to my friend playing Bach. He was a chemistry student from Shipley and a really good player.

Our own parish church acquired a second-hand organ that was probably originally in a much larger building. It can sound impressive. It can also be a hazard, especially for the choir if it is played too loud when they are trying to sing, which unfortunately it often is. Then they can't compete and end up with sore throats. Worse still, the sound levels can exceed the recommended safety limits.

7 Hz weapon
The organist also has a taste for discords, especially in the bass register. These sound unpleasant. A sound similar to that of a crying baby, or an air raid siren, will arouse feelings of fear and dislike through association and memory, which might be considered a cultural response. It is not just a matter of taste or personal preference, though that comes into the picture. Our feelings of distaste are a biological response. Low frequency discords create infrasound as beat frequencies. Two notes played together in the lower octaves will generate infrasound in the range of 4 Hz to 15 Hz, where people are not even consciously aware of it. The frequency of 7 Hz is notorious. A vehicle designer once told me that it was important to avoid creating structures - railway carriages, for instance - with a resonant frequency of 7 Hz, as it would make passengers feel sick. The same frequency has been mentioned in connection with a US weapons programme, using infrasound at this frequency.

'Acoustic Trauma: Bioeffects of Sound,' by Alex Davies states that the most profound effects at this infrasonic level occur at 7 Hz , which "corresponds with the median alpha-rhythm frequencies of the brain. It is also commonly alleged that this is the resonant frequency of the body's organs and hence organ rupture and death can occur at high-intensity exposures."

In one UK study, it was found that the extreme bass frequencies instilled strange feelings at a concert hall. Effects were "extreme sense of sorrow, coldness, anxiety, and even shivers down the spine." [source; Organ Music Instills Religious Feelings,' by Jonathan Amos, 9/8/2003]

7 Hz infrasound can be produced on an organ by playing at the same time the C below middle C and the C# a semitone above (130.8 and 138.5 Hz). In lower octaves still, for example on the pedal organ, the disturbing infrasound frequency can easily be generated by playing certain chords, in which case the amplitudes will be much higher due to the greater energy in the lower registers with their long pipes. Bottom A and C# are a very unpleasant chord. I wonder if the organist knows this and does it deliberately? I would expect that this piece of information is well known amongst the organ playing fraternity.

An organist at Brompton Oratory used be able to clear the large church in about half a minute by playing the appropriate music. It was more effective than a fire alarm. People made a dash for the exit, probably without realising why. Perhaps this is one reason why I have developed a distaste for my local parish church.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...