Simulation of reed vibration in lingual organ pipes

A pipe organ is characterized by the capacity to imitate a complete orchestra. Although organ pipes with several hundred different sounds, the so-called stops, can be manufactured in organ building, only two principally different pipe types are used showing different kinds of sound generation. The functioning of the first type, the flue or labial pipe, was already investigated within previous extensive research projects. The second pipe type, the reed pipe, is less often installed in pipe organs, and only little research was done in this field so far. This is why this pipe type is now the focus of research of the working group "Musical Acoustics" at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics. Since the reed organ pipe is a complex acoustic system it was necessary to examine first of all each component separately and then compose an overall picture from the findings gained. Soon, it was obvious that even measurements of the shallotreed system provided results, which were hardly explainable. Thus the idea was developed to build a "simple reed pipe model".