Organs

eggshaped · 297827. Tue Mar 18, 2008 6:38 am

Question: Where would you find the world's largest organ?

Forfeit: Well, I don't like to brag..., Royal Albert Hall, Liverpool Cathedral, in my pants.

Answer: In the caves of Virginia.

Notes:

Last year, i posted this question thinking that the answer was the sea organ, a seventy meter long sculpture on the shores of Zadar, Croatia.

It is the world’s first pipe organ that is played by the sea and was created by architect Nikola Basic in 2005. The pipes are located under the concrete so that the sea water and wind movements produce sounds.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that the most beautiful sunset in the world can be seen from Zadar quay.

BUT...

Located deep in the Luray Caverns in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley is the Great Stalacpipe Organ, the worlds largest musical instrument.

It is played by a keyboard which is attached to rubber-tipped mallets which hit the appropriate stalactites.

The cavern covers 3 1/2 acres of caverns and the rocks create tones of symphonic quality. It was invented in 1954 by Mr. Leland W. Sprinkle of Springfield, Virginia, a "mathematician and electronic scientist at the Pentagon".

It took him 3 years to find stalactites that precisely matched a musical scale, before wiring electronic mallets around the caverns and connecting them to a large console.

eggshaped · 336874. Thu May 15, 2008 6:27 am

Here's the first of this series' "I wish I'd read this earlier"

Artist David Byrne has just done something similar to the Luray caverns.