 And what do you hear what some of this music sounds like before I actually start talking about it? This is the noise of roller organ. What's happening is that the little cylinder there is turning and this little spike stuck into it and that, of course, opens the valves here. And behind each one of these valves is what is known as a free reed. That means that one end of the reed is fastened and the other end is vibrating to make the music. The song is actually wrapped around the cylinder about three times and the cylinder gradually moves across and plays the song. This is a play of the end. Unfortunately, bad quality. Remember that quality when I talk about it later. It's playing the hallelujah chorus. I'm just going to play a little bit of each one of these songs just to give you an idea of what it sounds like. This song is known as the Moor Beer Popo. Dark glasses down and we shout Moor Beer and our troubles all will drown. That's a love. Now that was a play of piano. But this is known as ragtime. Ponky talk is where you either put a thumbtack in the felt of each hammer so when the hammer hits the string of the piano it makes this rather tinny little sound. This is a play of reed organ. What you're hearing right now is pumping to create the vacuum which actually drives the organ. Once again, this is created by the use of the free reed with the air being pulled across the reed. The reed vibrating, the air column vibrates, goes into the sound board and increases the sound. This is the roll of paper here which is doing that and these are known as stops. Just like in regular organ stops create different voices for the organ. This is a Nickelodeon. Like the play of piano also uses a roll of paper to control it but has additional things like snare drums, cymbals, silagrone, things like that. And as a Nickelodeon they typically had a coin box where you drop a little coin in to make them work and they would have several songs on a roll and you would have these in a restaurant or something like that to provide entertainment. It's even a song. Drop your magic Nickel in the Nickelodeon. Finally, The Opus One, which some of you will be seeing on Wednesday when you go on a trip, the day trip, if you stop by Trinity Church here in New York we'll hear more about The Opus One later. I should have stopped. Well, we'll let it go in the background. It's okay. This is my talk about player pianors. I'm actually going to stop it. Then we'll just start it again. This is annoying. Okay, this is about player pianors or pianolas and free software or correlation. Now I'm going to bring a little bit of loose stuff to this. Although I do like collecting these, I'm not a serious collector. I only have about seven or eight of these instruments in my house. Serious collectors have a serious number of instruments and are very serious about the whole thing, but I'm not. We're going to go back in time a little bit. Back before the days of automated musical instruments I always loved making music and drums or flutes or things like that. Some people think the string instruments came about because somebody had a bow and arrow and they twanged the bow and string vibrated. It makes a sound. That's kind of cool. And they kept making it more and more sophisticated. And then finally they developed something called the harpsichord. A wonderful instrument that you would make the strings vibrate by plucking them. And they had a keyboard to do it. Then about 1703 a person in Florence, Italy by the name of Christofori made another instrument. And Christofori was an instrument maker. He made a lot of different instruments. And he invented this new instrument. But the problem was it was a very expensive instrument to make. And there was no music for it. No music, no demand. No demand, no people to buy the instrument. No people to buy the instrument, no music for it. And he said, jeez, I could patent this instrument, make a lot of money except nobody's going to buy it. That's a problem. And people say, well, you know, patents didn't exist then. Oh yes they did. And actually patents existed since the year 1300 in Florence, Italy. The written patent was in use since 1300 in Florence, Italy. They well understood what a patent was. So what should he do? What should he do? He finally decided he was going to publish how to make this instrument. Because after all, if other people were making it, it didn't make any difference to him. He was the inventor of this instrument. People would naturally come to him if they wanted the very best of these instruments. And he'd still make lots of money. So he tried to find people in Italy who would publish how to make this instrument, but nobody did. So finally he went to Germany and he found some German publishers who published exactly how to make the instrument. And all these German instrument makers looked at this and said, yeah, we can make those. They started making them and they gave away a few samples. And you may have heard of, you know, to musicians of the day. And you may have heard of a couple of these people, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart. Because the instruments that Siferelli made, the instrument that, unlike the harpsichord, they could only play loud. Because the harpsichord plucked the string and let it go. You could only play it loud. This instrument, you could play both loud and soft. Piano and forte. Piano, forte. Or the piano. That was the instrument that Siferelli invented in 1703. And if he had tried to patent it, we might never have had the piano, forte. Because even with this procedure, even with him giving away the idea, even with these people giving away the instruments, it still took almost 100 years for the piano to replace the harpsichord as an instrument in the orchestra. So the piano really isn't as old as a lot of us think. Now, in the 1830s and most of the United States, there was reed organs. Reed organs were really, really popular because they were relatively inexpensive to buy. If you bought a piano from the Sears Robot catalog, it would cost about $300. But you could buy a really nice reed organ for only $30. Now, of course, you could buy a pair of shoes for $1. You could buy a horse for like $4. So everything in general, but in relative. But reed organs were a lot cheaper than pianos. About one-tenth the price. And this was the instrument that every nice young girl would learn to play. Because this was the way that she was going to get the big, strong man. I don't know. This is really ridiculous. I'm sorry. But this is the way they thought back then. This is how you get to really be a strong man to take them as their wife and give them the nice, strong, wonderful living they have for the rest of their life. So they learned how to play these in the parlor and they'd invite the young men in to hear them play and stuff. And mostly it was religious music. All these religious music and stuff. This is what they had. Or church music and stuff. And the churches loved these reed organs too because they were relatively temperature resistant. So you could lower the teat in your church and they wouldn't be warped out of shape. If you take a piano with the harp that's in the back of most pianos and you take it through different temperature changes like winter to summer or even cold of night or warm of day, you can actually warp the entire harp with all the strings and break the piano. So you have to keep the piano at a relatively even temperature. But reed organs doesn't make any difference because as the reed expands and contracts, it just goes back to the same length, the same temperature. It's great. And they even had portable reed organs. Little ones that could fold up. During World War I and World War II they would have these little reed organs go out and the chaplains would play them and people would sing to music and everything like that. And here's some of the inner workings of the reed organ. A relatively simple mechanism. You had the little reed right here that would be vibrating and the key would lift, and you'd force up the pallet to allow the air to go past and everything. So it's a simple mechanism. And then the stops gave different voices. By making different reeds and different ways that the air moved through the system, you could actually have it sound like different wind instruments. You even had very large and fancy reed organs. Now you see pipes here, but this isn't a pipe organ. Those pipes don't work. They simply put those pipes there to make it look like a more expensive pipe organ. And they were all just decorative. But you can see it did have three manuals, three keyboards, and they did work and you see all the numbers of stops here. And sometimes these instruments might have hundreds, 400, 500 different reeds in there that would make the different sounds. So they could be quite complex. Now the difference between a reed organ and a pipe organ other than the pipe organ has pipes and the reed organ has reeds is that the pipe organs typically have a blower that blows the air into the pipes and reed organs create a vacuum by pumping them which sucks the air over the reeds. So we say that reed organs suck and pipe organs blow. Now all of this, of course, was without any type of automation. So if we're going to take you back in time to say 1880 or something like that, there was no radio, there was no phonographs around. Edison didn't do the phonograph until some time later and certainly there was no surround sound or five channel, seven channel, that type of stuff. It was even before eight tracks. I didn't think anything was before eight tracks. There were music boxes and roller organs like we've seen but, you know, yeah. They only played like one or two songs on them and stuff and the cylinders that had most music boxes had or roller organs had were relatively expensive to produce. So these things really weren't that popular. Here's an example of the end of a roller organ. You see a number of little pins that had to be jammed into them and even had instructions written on the back to make sure you put it in the roller organ the right way. Now in 1880, the first player piano was created. Now they used a piece of paper roll, a soft, you could think of it as software going across and then again the foot-powered bellows that sucked the air through the system and as the paper ran across a bar that had holes in it, then the vacuum would be broken and then a series of bellows and things inside would actually make the keys work. Now this was not a major success at the beginning because the piano had 88 keys to it, a standard piano, and these rolls only had 56 holes in it. So in terms of software we would say that this didn't meet minimum needs for functionality. And relatively few player pianos were created between the period of... Actually this is wrong, 1860 and 1880. The piano player was first created in 1860. And here's a picture of one of the rolls. You can see relatively big holes and stuff like that. But in 1890, a major breakthrough happened what became known as the standard 88 note player piano. And a standard was created of how far apart the holes were going to be, how big they were going to be, how they go along the length of it. There was actually 89 holes in it because one hole was used for the sustain pedal. And there was a bellows that guided this. One of the problems that they had that before was trying to guide this piece of paper precisely over the roller bar so that the holes all lined up. But they figured out that they could use a bellows to force it back and forth and keep it in alignment and that way they could have the holes smaller and closer together. So this is a picture of my player piano. This is a Beckwith, Beckwith player piano. Beckwith actually was manufactured by the Sears Robot Company as a brand name. And there's all sorts of parts to this. I mean the keys. And then this was a board that flipped down and you would have controls for tone and loudness and speed and things like that. I'll show you more of the rest of this but here's the roller mechanism right here and this is actually a little vacuum engine. We'll see this in closer detail in a moment. So this is the read head and feedback mechanism. So up here you would have the roll of paper that would be coming down here to this take up spool and here's the bellows that actually guides this back and forth and keeps it aligned. You have little fingers on either side here that run alongside the paper. So if the paper goes a little bit too far to one side a valve opens and the bellows moves this thing back to pull it back in the opposite direction. If the paper goes too far in the other way then the other finger opens up, the first finger closes and it gets pulled back with the bellows. So it's just a feedback mechanism guiding it across. Here's the read head and the bus lines coming back. This is the read head up here and these are rubber tubes coming down with a little series of little bellows that actually make the keys work. So for every hole there's a rubber tube and even for the sustained key. So you can see there's a fair amount of work that went into making this thing. Here's the device driver. As I said we have the vacuum motor over here. It has a combination crankshaft and valve shaft there and there's a valve that slides up and down which controls the air going in and out of the bellows and then the bellows act like pistons that turn the crankshaft and then that goes into this which is gearing that makes it either go forward to allow the piano roll to unwind or reverse to allow the piano roll to rewind with the motor going in the same direction. And then down at the bottom you have the server system which is the two foot pedals which you pump with two large bellows on either side to create the vacuum. Of course with every system you have to have accessories. Highly expensive accessories sold to you by the system vendor. And here we are. This is a little bellows here because these paper rolls sometimes have little chads stuck in them not unlike Florida voting systems. Little chads stuck in them that get stuck in the head and the reed head so you have to suck those little chads back out using a vacuum. And of course I'll sell it to you at an astounding rate. And this is the minimal vacuum here which is sold for 75 cents and this is the super deluxe one that sold for $1.75. Remember you could buy a whole nice pair of shoes for a buck. This is the official murder graphite. Now I know you think you might be able to use other graphite but this is the official murder graphite and costs about six times more than any graphite you get from any other source. Here's the official polish for your piano which is astronomically expensive as opposed to any of the parts but of course you want to buy that and then there's the instruction manual which nobody ever read. It hasn't changed. Now between 1890 and 1930 2.5 million player pianos were created in the United States alone. Now this is really impressive considering the fact that there weren't that many people living in the United States. I mean between that period of time like a quarter of our states weren't even states yet. So this is really a huge number of instruments that are going out and it's because this was how you could dance with your girlfriend. Again, you have to imagine this in your mind. You're in Kansas. You're in Kansas, there's no radio, there's no TV, none of this stuff exists and you can't play an instrument of any type nor can anybody in your family. You like to dance with your girlfriend so you open up your Sears robot catalog and inside it's playing your piano and you order it and someday the person shows up carrying this thing on his back. Okay, I'm just kidding you, okay? Because it shows up in a freight wagon but it's delivered to you, they move it into your house and now you can get your little brother or sister to face the wall, not look at your girlfriend and you face the wall and pump this thing like crazy and you can play songs where the whole family could sit around this and sing Christmas carols and stuff like that. Wonderful, this was the toast at town. Now, here's the importance of the 88-node standard. Before the 88-node standard came out lots of vendors made roles and but the roles were different sizes and only play on the piano that came from that vendor but when the 88-node standard came out it allowed all these different vendors to create, you know, different roles and they would all play on different pianos so you could accumulate a huge collection of music from this. Now, inside of this standard you could still innovate because remember those little fingers? Well, sometimes those little fingers got stuck sometimes those little fingers need lubrication sometimes they felt when the little fingers leaked they were really terrible but later on somebody got the bright idea we don't need little fingers. All we need to do is have a hole on either side an additional hole in the tracker bar on either side of the paper if you use too far to the left or too far to the right one of those holes becomes uncovered and the ballast does the same thing and so we can eliminate having to create those little fingers, the felts the little rocking mechanisms and stuff we had innovation or still using the same standard and likewise the people that made the roles could innovate because you could use either very cheap paper and a cheap paper ending, you know, for it or you could have really expensive paper now why would you want to have the expensive paper and the expensive endings? It's because it's a song you're going to be using for years and years and years you want the paper to last a long time it's a Christmas Carol it's a song you really want to hear over and over again or you're in a church and you want to play the same you know, the same hymn over and over but that song you only want to hear once in a while you download it from iTunes you get the paper that's really cheap and the cheap paper endings sometimes that's it sell it to somebody else, you don't care so these are things that you could have innovations now sometimes the innovations didn't make very much sense you look at the back of the player piano you're going to repair it and you see something and you say why in the world do they do something that stupid? I don't understand why did they do something that stupid that's really an ignorant way of doing that and then all of a sudden it occurs to you you say Ciparelli didn't patent the original piano but if you look in the back of any piano even today you'll see a list of patents all the way down this is patented, this is patented, this is patented, this is patented and the reason that person put that stupid thing in there was to get around one of those patents so they purposely made the piano worse than they could have because they didn't want to pay the royalty on that patent or the patent was blocking them from using a much better technique it hasn't changed now the reed organ people who manufactured these started to fight back because remember there was 2.5 million player pianos created in that period of time but before that SD Corporation in Vermont had generated 500,000 reed organs that was just one of the larger ones there were millions and millions of reed organs out there and they tried to fight back and the reed organs were positioned as being passe you know nobody wanted to reed organ anymore they wanted as cheap things you wanted a piano because it cost a lot more money and they had a much larger margin on the pianos and shiny logos absolutely but you can see that this is a player reed organ as a matter of fact this is a Wilcox and White Symphony player reed organ 455 different reeds in it you can pull out and make all sorts of things including a harmonics human voice vibrating like that cool now I told you about the 88 note standard piano but unfortunately or fortunately as the case may be there is another type of piano called the reproducer the problem with the 88 note standard is either the key was hit or the key was not there was no in between now if you play a keyboard instrument of any type if you know that that is not exactly how you play it you have a certain amount of attack and sustain on the key you can hit it lightly, you can hit it heavily you can somewhat duplicate this even with the 88 note standard by pumping slowly or loudly or hitting the loudness button but you could tell the difference between a 88 note standard player piano and if a human being particularly a good human being was playing the piano so they came along and they created something called the reproducer and the reproducer had about 50% more holes in the paper which allowed you to completely duplicate what the person was playing and it had about 50% more parts and it cost about 50% more money than the standard player piano and there were about four vendors that made these reproducers unfortunately they also made different holes and different and some of them specialized in jazz and some specialized in classics and some specialized in honky tonk and so you couldn't really get a whole library of music with these reproducers you can get a lot of music but it was kind of like the RAII is today where if you own a restaurant you actually have to pay royalties to three different organizations so that you could play all music in your restaurant yes that's true and basically the public rejected them for the most part because they didn't see the extra value for getting this for most people the 88 note standard was good enough and it was also hard to find service because you always had to go back to the person who made that piano to get the parts and stuff like that so you could think of reproducer pianos as proprietary then in 1930 the depression hit and suddenly people couldn't afford these pianos anymore and most of the piano firms went out of business they never recovered because after the depression came World War II and by the time World War II was over with you had radio, the beginnings of TV the phonograph was well endeavored and people didn't want to pay out the money for a player piano or to pay for the expensive relatively expensive roles and so a lot of the player pianos eventually migrated down to the basement where the leather bellows would rot and the rubber tubes would rot mice would get into them and build little nests and everything and speaking of that, mice mice are the devil and everything but then about 1960 with all those hippies and the environmental movement and stuff there was this revival because these things didn't use electricity they were kind of funky you sit there you can repair them and restoration began and a lot of the companies that had gone out of business in making roles went back into business and you could get songs like Bridge Over Troubled Water and Peter Paul and Mary and Billy Joel's Piano Man put on the paper roles to play on these pianos and then they started creating regular player pianos again it was a company in Seneca, Pennsylvania to play your pianos but only the 88 note ones nobody was making new reproducer pianos if you wanted to do a reproducer piano you got one of these things from Yamaha that did the same thing on a CD but not the paper role because they were simply too expensive and to restore these old reproducer pianos in a type of volume was also expensive and so it is with free software we have great functionality for very low price it's built on top of standards we can innovate above and below those standards and we can improve it without breaking the standards now I'm going to do a little side step here because I have another interesting story to tell you in 1938 war was on the horizon and there was this person living in Austria who was very nervous because they were Jewish and they decided that they were going to leave Austria and go to Great Britain for safety they went there and they got involved with the movies and after that they left Britain and went to Hollywood and they were in movies in the Hollywood but they had a great deal of training in mathematics and science and stuff their father had been a mathematician and their mother was actually in music and the arts so they have a really broad background and they kept thinking about Hitler and his U-Boats and how his U-Boats kept sinking all these merchant marines and sinking the boats so they said there's got to be some way that I could help with this now they did have torpedoes back in those days but the torpedoes were relatively slow and they gave off little trails of bubbles so it's easy for the U-Boats to see where the torpedoes were going people thought about controlling the U-Boats with radio but the problem with that was if the Germans intercepted the radio broadcast they would really know that the torpedoes were coming and perhaps by jamming it they could even turn the torpedoes back and sink the boat that had launched the torpedo so this person got the idea of taking a little bit of the signal and putting it on different frequencies making it very hard to detect and if he kept doing this randomly it made it also very very hard to jam and they they had this idea but they didn't know how to do it and one day they were in Hollywood at a show and this person had 16 player pianos up on the stage with these 16 player pianos were all coordinated together playing the song and some of them were playing one song one part of the song another part of the song, the different voices of the song but this person was coordinating all this using another piano roll so they got together and they formed the patent and they said by using a piano roll we can control at any particular time what part of the signal is on each one of these different frequencies and they submitted this to the war office gave them the rights to use the patent and the war office looked at this and said kind of an interesting idea but we can't really put a piano roll in a torpedo and have another one at the transmitter so it's interesting but we can't implement it with current day technology every once in a while they dragged this patent out look at it vacuum tubes came and went transistors came and went and in the late 1950s they started saying we can do this with transistors we can put a synchronization unit in the torpedo and a synchronization unit at the radio and synchronize this not only that because we can put this in missiles but other things that we can guide with radio and so from 1950s particularly during the Korean War to around 1976 this was still top secret but in 1976 it was declassified and there were certain manufacturers who looked at this and said this is a great idea we're going to use this for things like bluetooth wifi cell phones because this became the basis of spread spectrum technology and we're going to be used to that in the 1990s the EFF found out about all of this and said you know the person that invented this was never the two people actually that invented this was never properly rewarded for this they never made any money off the patent they were never even given any recognition for this in fact the first person I told you about after the government said yeah kind of an interesting idea they said well I've got other ideas can I help you out with this oh no you're not going to work with our scientists or anything you're just a movie star why don't you do things like sell war bonds okay they did sell war bonds in fact doing one sale one campaign of war bonds they sold over 7 million dollars worth of war bonds because this is a very famous person in their own right very famous as a movie star in fact at one time they were called the most beautiful woman in the world Hedy Lamar Hedy Lamar created the first rendition of spread spectrum technology they found her in Florida living almost in poverty and they finally recognized her right before she died now why should we preserve this as an art form well once again player pianist are falling out of favor people find them too large for their homes they don't think about it they'll go out and pay $6,000 for a new piano but they won't restore an old antique piano which they may get for free it's been another $2,000 to restore it to pristine condition they won't restore one they'll go for electronic keyboards and stuff like that and a lot of times these pianos are just junked and the paper rolls are falling apart because a lot of these rolls are created using paper that was washed in acid and so over time as moisture gets into the paper they simply deteriorate and fall apart the role making companies are once again going out of business in fact the last major one QRS has simply simply stopped making rolls for right now they say maybe we'll go back into business later on but why should we be saving these is because these rolls were actually created by artists playing artists like Gershwin would sit down to a keyboard and actually make the rolls and a lot of very famous people their music is embedded in these rolls even the 88 note ones now we also have a lot of our sayings that come from these don't shoot the piano player it's interesting that during the time the player piano started up the musicians union fought them like crazy because they said you know something player pianos are going to drive all professional piano players out of business sound familiar? didn't happen did it I mean it's hard to find a player piano these days but you still find plenty of people making a living playing piano live we have some of our other sayings remember those buttons I showed you on the organ those are stops if you push in all the stops and you hit the key on the organ no sound comes out because it's no voice that's been selected the more of them you pull out the more voices you hear so if you pull out all of them and pump really hard you get this really loud wonderful sound of crescendo this is known as pulling out all the stops another thing that happens in a player in a particular player is you have these two panels down below if you push them with your knees in effect you open up all the stops at one time these are known as the swell again it makes this really loud grand sound it's really swell and finally there's a concept of ragtime and honky talk where something is kind of a tinny kind of questionable thing it's kind of honky talk so recently we've been looking at how to preserve these old paper rolls and one way is to take them through a scanner scan them and turn them into MIDI and now you remember all those rubber tubes that come down from the reed head if you cut those rubber tubes in half and you stick a little valve in there and you connect those up to a MIDI controller you can actually now play your MIDI sound files through a controller and actually piano actually play it so this is not recording on an mpeg3 and playing it back it's actually having the piano play the same music without having it go through a paper roll and of course it's nice because then you can use a MIDI keyboard to create new music that that particular instrument has never played before and the other way of doing it of course is to play the existing roll on your piano one time recorded as an mpeg3 so you can play it back and people can listen to it and I thought about doing this and a lot of people in the organization the AMICA have been doing this but one day I started to I started to feel the hackles in the back of my neck stand up and I started to think about copyright so I made sure that I was using a song that was way out of copyright like Green Sleeves an ancient English melody completely out of copyright if it was ever in copyright sometimes we have to question about whether a song is in copyright for example Happy Birthday I know a lot of you may not know this but Happy Birthday is actually in copyright and if you sing it in a public place you have to pay a royalty to the people that own the patent or the copyright on Happy Birthday it's frightening so I called up this company called QRS and I talked to them I said can I make an mpeg3 out of an old old roll with Green Sleeves and I said well yes it's true Green Sleeves was never copyrighted but the artist's rendition of Green Sleeves was because in every music of course there's the actual music the notes, the words, things like that but the artist's rendition of it is something which is copyrightable think about Eric Clapton's Leila Leila you got me on my knees Leila my roommate played that song 457 times in a row when I was back in college until I finally went into his room took the record off the record player and stamped on it like that it was 10 years before I could listen to Leila again okay but then one day I heard something else in the radio Leila you got Leila Leila Unplugged same words different rendition and yes it was copyrighted so this is a problem too it's the artist's rendition and then somewhere in ancient history our Congress came forward with something known as the Phono Record Copyright Act of 1972 which somehow has warped time and space so that you can actually copyright something before it's written I don't understand how it's done I don't really understand it because it's that thick but it's really scary and so we both agreed, this guy from QRS and I that if you took a song that was so ancient that nobody could have copyrighted it on a roll made by a piano company that was no longer in existence and you only took 30 seconds of it so somehow it fit inside of the Fair Use Act and you declared yourself as a non-profit educational institution solely for the prevention and preservation of old music that maybe you could get away with it but please don't use a QRS roll because you would hate to have to sue me here it is I don't take a chance okay now we're going to come forward to the modern day September the 11th 2001 the World Trade Center was in the process of collapsing about a block from the base of the World Trade Center this little church known as Trinity Church very beautiful church and that day the organist was sitting in the church practicing on the organ as the World Trade Center was collapsing didn't know if it he heard about it, went running out of the church but he left the blower on the church running on the organ running and what happened was they pulled in all this dirt and filth and asbestos and things like that and the pipes, some of the pipes on a pipe organ are way smaller than your little finger in diameter and these all got jammed with this dust and everything and basically destroyed the organ they went out to look for an electronic organ temporarily now I should also tell you that Trinity Church has been in existence a very long time and as a church they're fairly wealthy because they own a lot of land in New York City this university and the land that this university is on was donated by Trinity Church and the other interesting thing is there's this walkway between Trinity Church and Wall Street it's up in the air so you don't even have to go down to the street level to get from Wall Street to Trinity Church so I figure what happens is the brokers on Wall Street go there at least twice a day if the stock is dropping like a rock they go there to pray like a bullet and they sold short they go there to pray so in either way church wins now there's this company in Massachusetts named Marshall and Ogletree I should back up a little bit when you have an electronic organ there's basically two ways you can make one you can synthesize the sound and so you do mathematically a synthesis of the sound that makes it sound like an organ but they're still working on that they're still improving it it doesn't really give a satisfying sound the other way you do it is you sample the sound so you go to a real organ you hook a microphone up to the pipe and you sample the sound and you may sample it for like 15 seconds and you sample one pipe and then what you do is you simulate the two pipes next to it because you know what that one sounds like so you can simulate the other two pipes well that's what most companies do in the database of sounds Marshall and Ogletree sampled every single pipe in the organ some of these organs have 30,000 pipes and Marshall and Ogletree didn't sample it just for 15 seconds they sampled it for 3 minutes because it takes time for the air to come into the pipe and come to steady state to make the real sound they created this database and it did not just for one organ different organs around the world so you go to one part of the database you could be Notre Dame's organ you go to another part of the database you could be Wichester Cathedral's organ you can actually mix the organs as you're playing and they came and they said to Trinity we'll create an organ for you and we call it the Opus 1 and as you can see 240 different voices at one time and sampled for 3 minutes to create probably what is one of the world's best organs so after they had put this together in the process of putting this together they actually tried to use Windows to support this and they said no Windows is too unstable to support anything as important as an organ concert 10 PCs with one as a hot standby and they can monitor this organ over the internet while it's playing they can update it while it's playing they can add new voices while it's playing over the internet this organ costs $5 million has a 15,000 watt amplifier and two consoles like the one I showed you like this one it's really a magnificent instrument I went down there this morning and the associate organist took me through and showed me some of the PCs that were there the networking in the back I'm sure most of you are familiar with this type of stuff these are the actual amplifiers that amplify the music this is the air conditioning system that they have in their closet where they put all this and there is their PC where they can sit there and monitor it locally and monitor it remotely back in the factory these are some of the old pipes which they still have in there some of the larger of the pipes this is a ladder that can be used to go up and reach up towards the pipes I just thought I'd throw that in there as you can see the size of the original organ that they had and then this is the steps that you have to go up and I'm showing you the steps because if you go down there to see it on Wednesday morning at 10.30 it would be difficult to get the large group up that tiny little set of staircases to see the actual mechanism but we've set it up so that you can hear the organ, you can talk to the organist and maybe somebody could actually play it we don't know yet with that I'd like to thank the Debian team for putting together DebConf and DebDay and I'd like to thank especially Philip for helping me get in because I didn't realize I could come here to the very last moment and Robert Ridgel is the associate organist of Trinity Church and I'd like to thank all of you for creating free software thank you very much if you would like to hear a little bit more of the organ music I do have one little video that I made this morning with Robert and it has a little bit of a demonstration of the Opus 1 that's as loud as I can get it oh I'm scrolling through I could be reduced to this because I was just thinking you actually have to go down there because in the church the church becomes part of the organ that certain nodes vibrate the entire building there's 15,000 watts so your microwave organ may be close to a thousand watts and it cooks hamburger in a matter of seconds it's really just an amazing instrument and Marshall and Ogletree is now duplicating these instruments through many different churches but only in a billion dollars Trinity Church actually gives concerts and organists come from all over the world to play this instrument Cameron Carpenter who is considered by some to be one of the best organists in the world today lives here in New York City and plays these instruments that they call virtual pipe organs a cute little story that went along with putting the Opus 1 in there in the first place was that they just installed it and Marshall Mr. Marshall of Marshall and Ogletree was standing there as the organist from the church was playing the organ and the organist sat down started playing it and everything and after a while he just stopped and just sat there and Marshall said this is silent is it okay? the man turns around and tears are coming down his face he says this is the best organ I've ever played and Marshall says you mean the best electronic organ the guy says no the best organ period and Trinity Church who originally thought of this only as a temporary organ until they could find somebody that would build a real pipe organ they decided this is going to be their real pipe organ because how could they ever have an organ that would be better than this one so I suggest you know if you want to as part of your day out on Wednesday stop by the church on your way out you can continue on to Coney Island after that and see it and we've said it opposite you can have a private showing thank you very much