Judit Esti: The sound of the organ is a very complex one. How could you realize such a reverb effect, one that can only be heard in a temple, listening to a real organ?
Csaba Huszty: Well, first we put the microphones to the place where we think the original voice and the reverberated voice sounds the best. We pressed the keys on the organ one by one, then using a computer, we created a database, which database can be controlled with a program and a synthesizer, and thus we created basically a new instrument, a virtual organ.
J.E.: How many notes did you record?
Cs.H.: I guess it was about 1600-1700 notes we pressed and recorded.
Szabolcs Varga: The sound of an organ is never the sound of the instrument itself but the sound of the instrument, the building (the resonating room), the temple. In other words, we did not record simply the sound of the organ of the Mátyás Church but the sound of the organ in the Mátyás Church and also, the sound of the Kispest organ in the Kispest Church.
It would not be the same sound recording two stops separately and play them together with the computer and to take the combination of the two organ stops.
Cs.H.: That's exactly why we took the combinations so that we could record the interaction of the pipes.
Sz.V.: With more than twice the resolution of a normal CD, we recorded the notes digitally, directly to a computer.
Cs.H.: We made the recording at night, because there is much less street noise then and there are no tourists in the temple who make quite a bit of noise. We took about 20-30 GB of data in the Mátyás Church.
Sz.V.: Then came post-processing. Cleaning and tuning the notes, filtering noises. It is no secret: the recorded sound of the organ contains a lot of noise, for example the engine of the organ can be heard quite badly, especially in quiet stops; this had to be removed one by one, from each note...
Cs.H.: ...and actually it looked in the beginning that we might fail because it is a bit more than simply restoring some old recording. We had to be very careful not to lose [any] important information from the sound.
J.E.: How much time did it take?
Cs.H.: I spent about a thousand hours with it and the noise-filtering took a year. There were quite a few round-the-clock days...
Sz.V.: After having spent hundreds of hours to clean the sounds from all kinds of noises like the organ engine, then we recorded the sound of the organ engine so that you can mix it back under the sound to make it authentic. This way you hear the engine sound only once, not many times [as if we did not filter it out in the first place].
J.E.: How is it different form the usual, traditional synthesizers where you can feel pretty much that it is a machine-produced, artificial sound?
Sz.V.: The name of the usual synthesizers comes from the fact that it synthesizes sound...
J.E.: ...meaning...
Sz.V.: ...meaning it generates the sound using oscillators and other types of electronic circuits; also, what is usually called in Hungary a synthesizer but in fact they are cheap keyboards, well, they usually contain sampled sounds as well but in a much worse quality, a lot less notes and the make various calculations to produce some decent sound using only these few sound samples.
Cs.H.: An electronic organ contains the sound of a whole stop in a very small place because it uses repeated, looped sound samples. There are no loops in our samples. We have 30-second notes (one minute in the pedal) and there is not a second repeated.
Sz.V.: For example, a high-quality synthesizer contains 48 MB compressed sound samples altogether and this is already hundreds of voices. In our case, the sample data of just one register is 200-400 MB; so there are organ voices in many other instruments but in a much worse quality.
Cs.H.: We thought that musicians would use this...
Sz.V.: ...musicians and composers for practice and composing, furthermore studios where you need very authentic, very beautiful organ sounds – for example, for a movie score.
J.E.: This must cost around an upright piano.
Cs.H.: No, it's not that much, I don't think so...
Sz.V.: ...one stop, one pipe row of a real organ costs around 1-1.5 million HUF [5-8000 USD, approx. wholesale price] and an electronic organ of a few tens of stops is still quite a few million HUF. If you buy new all our equipment (PC, pedal, all controllers), even then it is under one million HUF [5000 USD]. Together with the software and everything.
J.E.: What are the perspectives of this opportunity, that you can play such realistic organ music using these sounds?
Cs.H.: I think the long-term goal should be creating digital archives because what we just did is not simply recording the organ sounds but also recording it in a certain state. In a sense, we created a ‘snapshot' of the organ, as it was in February 2003, and this could be done with other organs as well, and this could become the basis for a researchable database.
Sz.V.: We could create a music museum where – unlike the ones we have now – you could actually play the instruments.
Elek László: You heard Csaba Huszty and Szabolcs Varga about the organ samples.