Why choose a Viscount Organ with Physis Technology?​

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Viscount and Whitesel Organs believe in innovation for every function of their products.  Fiber optic cabling replaces the archaic methods of our competitors using metal contacts that wear out and degrade over time.  Ultra-fast processors replace 1990’s style computer boards still found in other manufacturer’s organs today.  And an open source platform allows for updates to your organ for life.  This means that as new and more realistic pipe organ voices come along (which they inevitably will and already have), you can upgrade the voices in your Viscount Organ with Physis Technology in an instant.  And it’s as easy as accepting an e-mail attachment.  Best of all, these state of the art electronic components – what makes the “heart” of these instruments – is hidden inside beautifully-designed wood consoles.



As a musician, we understand that much of what goes into your experience at an instrument is what you feel and hear.  At the end of the day, you care little about what’s creating these sensations (Physis Technology), and more about if it created these sensations, and it does.  This is the inspiration behind these ingenious developments.  With Physis Technology, Viscount Organ has brought together state of the art 21st technology and the ancient and mighty pipe organ.  In our opinion, this technology today is as game-changing as the introduction of the digital computer organ in 1971 by a once innovative company, and a quantum leap beyond the introduction of sampled sounds in electronic organs over 20 years ago.

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An organ pipe can be seen as a mechanical multi-modal waveguide resonator.  The input air flow stimulates the pipe, which after a variable attack time starts oscillating.  The upper termination determines the harmonic components to be filtered, hence acts as a filter, while the lower termination is subject to regressive waves, which are added to the stimulus with a nonlinear law.  This whole mechanism is in feedback.  This provides a high dependence on small random changes, generating remarkable modifications in the sound from time to time, as in every real pipe organ.  The Physis Technology Algorithms, developed over 5 years by 40 Viscount Engineers (All of them musicians), take into account every physical and mechanical parameter of the air and the pipe, including shape, material, terminations shape and dimensions, incoming air pressure, etc.  This leads to many benefits, including a more realistic "ensemble" effect, because all the pipes are playing and resonating together, subject to the same airflow, variable attack and decay times, realistic harmonic recreation (no artifacts from pitch-shifting samples), no split points.  Remarkably, the air pressure changes are dependent on the amount of active stops, like in real pipe organs. Another important benefit is the fast and complex attack after ribattuto: if we press a key twice in a short time, the pipe starts resonating with a certain attack time after the first key has been struck, then if we do not leave enough time for a complete decay, the second time we strike the key, the attack time and resulting sound will be different and richer from the first time.  A sampled sound would just repeat unchanged.  Physis Technology recreates this natural and physical pipe organ phenomenon.

Digital Signal Processing:  Viscount Organs with Physis Technology relies on up to eight powerful DSPs, to generate sound, and hide inside an elegant wood console, The DSPs in use are SHARC processors, and have a working frequency of hundreds of MHz, and higher than common PC CPUs (up to GFLOPS, i.e. Billions of Floating Point Operations per Second). 



To put this in perspective, we will use a fellow organ manufacturer’s proud claim about their products processor speed.  In a recent custom 4 Manual Organ installation, this company touted that their instrument could easily process up to 16 million pieces of information per second.  This certainly sounds fast, and in the electronic organ world, it is, or should we say ‘was’?  A new Viscount Organ with up to 8 SHARC Processors easily produces over 12 BILLION operations per second. 



These operations are used to calculate in real-time the aerodynamics of flute, reed, bourdon pipes, and metal, following complex mathematical models. Reverberation is another important step in the processing chain, requiring the knowledge of the position and spatial parameters of the pipes, ambience dimensions, and windchest layout, which can be adjusted stop by stop. The sound is finally routed in the proper way throughout a plethora of external out connections.

The counterpart to these high-end DSPs are microprocessors and controllers, which are in charge of all the management functions: ARM processors can support many I/O devices, including screens, USB sticks and USB devices. But this cannot work without a good Operating System.



Linux powered: Linux is a stable and dynamic open source Operating System, created nearly 20 years ago, and continuously developed over time to keep up with the demands of today’s software.  Entering the open source world was a challenge for Viscount, but with many advantages, including the chance to enter a community of developers who make their knowledge and work available publicly for the whole world.  Linux O.S. is widely used in the research world and it is available in various configurations, each one suited for specific tasks.  Its kernel has been optimized for real-time applications, hence it suits best audio applications such as sound generation.  What would be better than a real-time O.S. to help us play a massive number of ranks and pipes altogether at the same time?

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Linux O.S. also allows for a complete set of connections, such as radio controls, USB drives and devices, and makes it possible to manage files, to lock the organ with a password and to run a MIDI sequencer, etc.

The only thing about Linux that scares computer users is its high complexity... Musicians, You won't need to worry though, Linux is safely hidden under a heavy and beautiful wood cabinet!



All kidding aside, we ask you to put your common sense cap on for a moment and ask yourself a simple question...who would you put complete trust in to build the most stable and dynamic operating system custom designed for organ sound generation ever?  An organ company? Or a company who's sole and entire purpose is to create stable and dynamic open source operating systems?

Knowledge is power.  For 65 years, Norman Whitesel Church Organs has watched as organ technology advanced.  Part of our wisdom is knowing when it's time to accept a new generation of advancements, and when to say goodbye to those companies who no longer embrace these values.  Our only loyalty is with God, and our church customer.  No company will dictate to us what's best for our congregations.  When it comes to new organ technology, we unequivocally choose Viscount Organs with Physis Technology.

A pipe organ produces three-dimensional sound with both up and down, and forward and backward movement as shown above.  A Viscount Organ with Physis Technology is the first digital organ that produces this type of movement with such realism.

Here are the most important innovations and technologies to happen in the electronic organ world in over 2 decades.  We proudly present Physis Technology…...

Physis technology, is Viscount’s latest attempt to revolutionize the classical organ market.  When seeking to create better and more realistic pipe organ voices, one thing was clear…It’s time to change the old PCM sound generation paradigm.  A sampled note will always sound unnatural, no matter how many tricks you use to resemble a real pipe organ.  Physis technology, calculates instead, in real-time the physics of a flue, reed or bourdon pipe.  The result is a living organ, changing in real time, resembling the organ you prefer, or creating a new sound.  Let's explain this with a few examples. What if a GPS navigator had to know every possible route instead of calculating it for you in real-time?  What if we had to film the Titanic sinking instead of calculating and rendering the scene with computer-graphics?  What if we had no physical models to forecast the weather?  Physis technology (physical modeling) is the answer to all these questions.  Physis technology is our implementation of physical modeling applied to organ pipes, something no one has ever tried before. It is the culmination of years of technological evolution.

Whitesel's in the 1950's