Experimental investigation of dynamic lingual organ pipes with blown open tongue

This paper presents the experimental examination of an alternative lingual organ pipe construction that uses a free tongue which, in contrast with traditional lingual organ pipes, operates in a blown open manner. A possible advantage of the construction is that it can enable changing the windchest pressure and thus, achieving an extended dynamic range while keeping a constant pitch. Three experimental pipes with diverse resonator shapes are investigated in various setups. The three pipes also demonstrate the variety of timbres obtainable by different configurations of tongues and resonators. The analysis of the measurement results shows that the pipes exhibit a very good stability of the fundamental frequency and can have a dynamic range of 15 dB. At the same time, the timbre of the sound is found to change significantly as the windchest pressure is increased. Experiments performed with damping the resonator reveal the working principle of the tongue-resonator coupling in the alternative construction. Several sound recordings are presented as multimedia file attachments enabling the subjective comparison of the pipe sounds.