How A Pipe Organ Works

Ancient technology that uses a complex system of pipes and valves to make music the sound of an organ is made by the column of vibrating air inside each pipe and the instruments have four crucial parts. Each pipe sits on top of a hollow wind chest that is filled with compressed air provided by a bellows or blower.

Willis Pipe Organ Stony Stratford How The Organ Works Mechanics Youtube

Because each pipe produces a single pitch the pipes are provided in sets called ranks each of which has a common timbre and volume throughout the keyboard compass.

How a pipe organ works. Simply stated the pipe organ is a big box of whistles. The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air called wind through the organ pipes selected from a keyboard. Each stop at the organ console represents a set of pipes a rank of a particular tone color with a different pipe for every note on the keyboard.

Pipes a chamber mechanical pressure and a keyboard. The biggest of instruments takes a half hour long video just to explore most of it help videos be made and see them early extra stuff on patreon. Amazingly the first one was invented in ancient egypt by a greek engineer around 300 bce.

A pipe organ feeds wind into pipes causing the air to oscillate and produce a sound. The pipes stand in line above the box referred to as the wind chest with wind fed from below into the pipes the organist wishes to use to produce sound.

Pipe Organs 101