Scientology (a family-destroying cult that brutally harassed the IRS into granting it recognition as a religion) is the perfect example, funneling huge sums into buying up real estate that then sits empty and generates no tax revenue. The center of Clearwater, FL is close to being a ghost town because of this.
Same experience here and upvoted accordingly. I stopped using/recommending VLC all the way back in 2012 due to Mr. Kempf's appallingly dismissive/aggressive attitude to carefully-expressed constructive feedback from multiple users after a regressive UI change (my handle here was "sillyrat" and then "silly-rat"):
TL;DR: they decided to force the playlist to stay open all the time, thus killing "mini-player" mode; reaction to this was, unsurprisingly, uniformly negative (but expressed politely); Mr. Kempf's response was to attack VLC users; I did an end-run around him by opening a bug ticket so other developers would be made aware of the problem, and Mr. Kempf banned me for doing so; my ticket was approved and addressed by other developers, fixing the issue; Mr. Kempf tried to back-pedal pitifully.
I tune organs professionally, and in the US most instruments are tuned to equal temperament. For the performance of pieces originally composed on unequal-tempered instruments, though, something is lost on equal-tempered organs: the movement through harmonic progressions on unequal temperaments creates a dramatic tension between consonance and dissonance, with dissonance increasing the farther you get from the more "in-tune" keys and decreasing as the progression returns to them. Similarly, pieces composed in keys that are some distance away from the "purest" key, gain their own distinctive colors. If you're used to equal temperament and then hear a big major chord in the temperament's home key on an organ with a historic temperament, the impact is really quite something as the thirds and fifths are much closer to the natural overtones of the unisons and the whole chord draws together into a gloriously-coherent tonality.
Pipe organs often contain stops called mutations (whose frequencies are non-integer multiples of unison-rank frequencies), and others called mixtures (where there are multiple such pipes per note, generally rather small and high-pitched). These are both intended to reinforce natural harmonics, and as such are tuned pure -- even on equal-tempered instruments! The exception is highly-"unified" instruments where one rank has been wired to play at both unison and mutation pitches (to save money and/or space); this sorta works for quints (fifths), but is pretty bad for tierces (thirds), and don't even try it with a septième (seventh).
While electronic tuners are often used to set an initial temperament on a reference rank (it can also be set by listening to the contrasting rates of the differential waves between fourths and fifths), we generally tune other ranks to the reference rank, listening to the differential waves created by the two ranks to discern in/out-of-tuneness. For mixtures and mutations, the trick is to be able to recognize differential beating with partials of the reference rank that are higher than the fundamental; and for very high pitches, listening for sub-harmonics comes into play (frequencies can align in a way that creates the illusion that they are harmonics of a fundamental that's not actually being played, and our brains fill in the fundamental; this phenomenon is sometimes used to create the illusion of extremely low "resultant" Pedal-division ranks sounding an octave lower than the root of the fifth that the pipes are actually playing, and the use of an independent pure-tuned quint rank produces the most convincing result).
>Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?
Officially, it's only on paper.
It kind of makes the key signatures come out more sensible because you don't want to have a signature where there are both sharps & flats in one key.
>electronic tuners are often used to set an initial temperament on a reference rank
>tune other ranks to the reference rank, listening to the differential waves created by the two ranks to discern in/out-of-tuneness.
The equivalent on guitar is to use the tuner for reference on the high E string only, then tune the low E to match perfectly by ear. You're going to be hearing a lot of these two, and they better be able to make you happy to begin with.
Then tune the middle 4 strings according to what the hands will be doing in relation to the reference strings, as well as who you will be playing with and how they are tuned.
Without an electronic tuner a single tuning fork is enough for this, and it's actually better than having a set of 6 forks at the nominal even tempered frequencies.
E=329.6 is the fork you want so you don't have to fret the high string to match an A=440 fork.
LibreWolf is a fork of Firefox that removes telemetry, Pocket, and other unwanted stuff. You can use a copy of your existing Firefox profile, but be sure to go through LibreWolf's settings as its defaults err on the side of privacy and may be different than what you already have set up.
Try LibreWolf -- it's Firefox with the nasty stuff stripped out. You can use your existing Firefox profile, but be sure to go through LibreWolf's settings as some of the defauts may be different than what you already have set up (they select privacy-protecting options by default).
LibreWolf is also available as an AppImage. After reading this news today, I downloaded that AppImage, started it up and closed it down (just to create a profile folder), and replaced the default contents of the new LibreWolf profile folder with a copy of the contents of my existing Firefox profile folder. I then started LibreWolf up and went into Edit-->Settings and inspected all of those (they didn't carry over for some reason so I had to check and edit them manually). Other than that, it's working fine so far: my old tabs / extensions / passwords are all here, and I'm writing this comment from LibreWolf! (I've kept my Firefox profile folder for now just to be safe, but have otherwise uninstalled Firefox.)
This is super-cool, and the multi-part recordings really show off what's possible with this creation. As someone who works on pipe organs (including their voicing and tonal finishing) for a living, I do want to comment on his statement that "at least in theory, organ pipes produce very simple waveforms". Actually, in both theory and practice they produce a huge range of overtones in addition to the fundamental, with open pipes being capable of producing both even and odd partials while stopped pipes produce only odd partials. While it's possible to construct and voice pipes in a way that comes close to producing only fundamental, it's almost never the goal, the exception being some pedal stops that are intended to produce shake (a sine wave of very low pitch) in the room and minimal color (overtones). Instead, we usually aim to give each stop its own complex and refined tonality consisting of huge numbers of harmonics, the profiles of which are dictated by both the construction and materials of the pipe and the process of voicing (the very delicate manipulation of numerous parts of the pipe to change its color and speech characteristics). Having said that, he's absolutely right that a good acoustic helps make a good instrument -- there's a saying that "the room is half of the organ"!
Maybe simple envelopes would be more accurate. Any waveform played with a rectangular envelope will sound "organy." Add modulation and a more nuanced envelope to avoid this.
Yes, electronic organs often have rectangular envelopes. Pipe speech has an envelope that is far more complex than one might expect; indeed, one of the goals of voicing is to impart an envelope that allows the pipe to be "articulate", to a degree dependent on the caracteristics of the stop of which it is a member and depending on the overall tonal milieu of the specific instrument. Taken to its extreme, this results in a clunky "chiff" sound at the start of each note, something often heard in instruments designed in the "American Classic" and "Neo-Baroque" styles; but with more refinement, it can produce the gentle puff at the beginning of a flute note, or the "bubble" articulation of a French Horn. And at the other end of the envelope is a characteristic decay, initiated by the closing of the valve beneath the pipe and sustained by the resonance of the pipe body (which, in large pipes, can go on for several seconds).
I didn't know the term "chiff," but looking up videos of the sound, it's very similar to an effect I accidentally created in a recent digital synthesis project by using a low sample rate for the envelope (2kHz). I think the stair-stepped shape of the attack created some inharmonics in the audio.
Is chiff the result of inharmonics created by brief turbulence in the airflow?
Yes indeed. In extreme cases, it can give the impression of a xylophone! To control chiff, we use a pointy double-sided knife called a "nicking tool" to create a series of evenly-spaced nicks across the entire width of the flue (which is the slot at the base of the mouth, formed by the lower lip and the languid inside the pipe; air leaving the foot of the pipe is focused by the flue on its way towards the upper lip). Often the nicks are cut into both the lower lip and the languid at similar depths and perpendicular to the flue, although there are exceptions; the width, depth, and spacing of the nicks all have tonal implications. Care must be taken to avoid over-nicking, as the articulation -- some of which is necessary even when chiffing is not desired, and which may need to be more prominent when close to the pipe than when listening from the room -- can be completely lost.
