It is currently Fri Mar 29, 2024 7:00 am


Franck's Grande Piece Symphonique on PAB Extended

Discuss and share submissions to the Contrebombarde website.
  • Author
  • Message
Offline

jcfelice88keys

Member

  • Posts: 184
  • Joined: Sat Jul 26, 2008 12:24 am

Franck's Grande Piece Symphonique on PAB Extended

PostMon Jul 13, 2009 1:45 pm

Hello Fellow Hauptwerkers,

A complete performance of Cesar Franck's Grande Piece Symphonique has been uploaded to the Contrebombarde Concert Hall:

http://www.contrebombarde.com/concerthall/music/1262

This performance makes use of the non-French tonal resources of the PAB organ, so the registrations and tempi are not what you would expect to hear performed live by Daniel Roth on the Cavaille-Coll instrument at St. Sulpice. I have experimented with PAB's voicing with respect to volume/brightness and microtuning adjustments of whole ranks, and the left-to-right panning of individual pipes within certain ranks. The result is a more close-up sounding instrument; perhaps some of the "coldness" that some fellow forum members have commented about the PAB might be due to its being miked some distance from the pipes (giving rise to less left-to-right panning) in a concert hall that was acoustically engineered for symphony orchestras rather than cathedral organs.

The 80+% data compression of the mp3 file format is evident in the subject performance. Still, I strived to maintain as much dynamic range as possible. Rest assured that the corresponding wav file (and organ library heard live) sounds much warmer than what is heard at the CBCH. Other than the voicing adjustments cited above, I did not employ any third party equalization, no third-party reverberation (i.e., no Altiverb) and zero compression, except for a limiter set to keep the fewest high dB from clipping.

The Franck piece has been in my repertoire since age 19 in 1972, and over the years I have registered the piece for numerous American organs (Skinner, Moller, Austin among the most noteworthy) and Canadian Casavants.

I hope you enjoy what you hear. There is no Youtube video of this piece, as it is nearly 25 minutes in duration, as opposed to Youtube's 10 minute maximum time limitation.

Cheers,

Joe
Offline

Calcant

Member

  • Posts: 184
  • Joined: Fri Mar 21, 2003 12:19 pm
  • Location: Darmstadt, Germany

Re: Franck's Grande Piece Symphonique on PAB Extended

PostTue Jul 14, 2009 3:53 am

Hello jcfelice88keys,
just permit me to make one comment: mp3 itself does not introduce audio level compression. The levels of the original wav files are maintained. The data reduction of the mpeg algorithm (in that case with the likelihood of confusion also called compression) is achieved solely by omitting certain parts of the frequency content which are masked by the human ear perception mechanism anyway and not by any level manipulation.
If you feel a clip has evident level differences compared with the wav source then there must definitely be other causes (perhaps worth some investigation). And beyond that, there are no shifts in the overall weighting of the spectraly energy - apart from certain digital artefacts depending on the reduction ratio.

Cheers

Calcant
It´s a virtue to be well-tempered.
German speaking readers are invited to visit http://www.orgelbits.de for info about HW subjects.
Offline

jcfelice88keys

Member

  • Posts: 184
  • Joined: Sat Jul 26, 2008 12:24 am

Re: Franck's Grande Piece Symphonique on PAB Extended

PostTue Jul 14, 2009 4:14 am

Hello Calcant,

Thank you for your insightful comments about the encoding of mp3 data. When I spoke of 80+% compression, I intended that to mean "data compression" rather than audio compression. The type of mp3 encoding I used was termed "lossy" compression, as opposed to "lossless" [data] compression.

I do not have the mp3 standard in front of me to refer to the manner in which data is subtracted, I am aware that the mp3 algorithm acknowledges that certain frequency ranges of human hearing are less susceptible than others, and it is these supposedly less susceptible ranges that data is removed. Usually the data is removed in the form of data-bits (one bit = 8 bytes). However, in the case of organ music, with its high concentration of frequencies over 4000 Hz, organ music does suffer when this data is subtracted, and then "added" back in. The artifacts of this data compression show up as a thin-ness of sound and a "phasey-ness" quality of the sound that is sometimes intentionally added to pop/rock guitar sounds to "phatten" them up.

I also believe that some of my performance practices may have irritated some of the more traditional French organ lovers, in that I had two swell pedals at my disposal, and I was drawing and reducing stops at a rate that is physically impossible by a single person playing a Caville-Coll instrument without the benefit of at least two stop drawing personnel manning the console.

Again, thank you for your insightful comments.

Sincerely,

Joe

Return to Contrebombarde Concert Hall

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests