Now i have tried the cymbalon and this is really sounding great :-)

Yes!

Yes, I can hear this too. I hear two things - a pleasant "click" right at beginning, and then I hear very high frequency, metallic overtones that decay rapidly. As you say, it really does sound like a steel string being struck.  It sounds *clear*, too - hi fidelity!
I haven't tried your layering idea yet.

Greg.

Some people claim to be already doing it:

http://www.domusorgels.nl/en/unico/physicalmodeling

I have several amusing anecdotes about Viscount (who developed Unico/Physis) and their prior mishaps which I won't repeat here. 

Suffice to say that they developed it over a 10 year period (based on computing power of 10 years ago?), the hyperbole is staggering yet there is not_one_single_demonstration of a single simulated pipe in a dry acoustic (e.g. a builder's voicing room). 

When the CM100 module came out, I had a lengthy exchange with the director of Viscount UK about it and begged for demos of even a few of the hundreds of voices they claimed in their literature.  All I received was links to some tutti performances of little-known germanic works which were swamped in artificial reverb and sounded little better than - no, I'll rephrase this - they were excruciating.  I also asked for information on what was user-alterable in the voicing and it was pretty disappointing.  If they don't have the voice you want, you're out of luck.

I saw this paper a few years ago when trawling for information on physical modeling.  The main disappointment is that they chose to model free reeds.  Very few organs use free reeds and the only type of reed stop using them is an imitative clarinet.  In a nutshell, if you wanted to add some pedal reeds to your small pipe organ, they would be striking reeds not free ones.

Okay, extract of Percy Whitlock's "Dolcezza" uploaded.  Bear in mind this is additive synthesis. 

...

There has *got* to be a better way of doing this than guesstimating/doing it by ear with additive synthesis though.

I love the organ too and sometimes play a sampled instrument from Sampletekk, but I would love a physical model.

Some people claim to be already doing it:

http://www.domusorgels.nl/en/unico/physicalmodeling

or are studying it:

http://www.sea-acustica.es/Sevilla02/mus06011.pdf

Has this produced any worthwhile result that you know of ?

Here's their page about the format, and the home page for downloading the free Scala program:

http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/scl_format.html
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/

BUT: I don't know for certain if loading a Scala file into PTeq has exactly the same effect as "manually" detuning each note one by one. Do the other elements interact the same way with the new tuning with a Scala file, or does the tuning come in later, just altering the pitches as though one had transposed the midi data? I'm afraid it may be the latter. I guess I have to post a separate question about this.

@Jake:

Somehow I missed the rest of the discussion about the tuning data and Scala files.  In short, I don't know anything about Scala files but I'm quite prepared to learn if that's going to help someone.

In respect of fractions of cents, Philippe et al would have the definitive answer as to whether this matters to the PTQ engine.  If it doesn't, the probable reason would be that a struck piano string won't keep to a static frequency, unlike an organ. 

If you held down 2 organ keys an octave apart and you had a tuning discrepancy of less than 1 cent, you may well hear the phase shifts over time.  This would be more noticeable on an electronic, because of the ways that electrical signals interact and phase cancellations are much greater in magnitude than with pure acoustic mixing. 

Tuning organs is tricky business because in particular, reeds will produce enharmonic noise which can beat against mixtures etc.  I don't see this being a problem with piano because the sound is constantly evolving in spite of your tuning accuracy.

Also, I don't have anything against changing the interface of Pianoteq in case of a possible future church organ add-on. Take a look at EastWest PLAY and their way of hosting vastly different sample libraries all through one unified interface.

Gents, I may know about organs and know a Willis from a Schnitger, but my maths skills are a big fat zero. It is incredibly frustrating knowing what I want to do, or have a piece of software do, but not be able to do it.

On the matter of the Pianoteq interface, I'm not suggesting hacking it to make an organ (a sacrilege), but a developing completely new software called Organteq.

I think the piano technician background of Phillipe Guillaume was critical in being able to develop Pianoteq.  A mathematician without this background would have a very difficult time understanding the interactions of the parts of a piano that affect the sound.

http://www-gmm.insa-toulouse.fr/~guillaum/cv_en.htm

Perhaps with your knowledge of organs, you could be in for a career change - math skills are learned.  Or you could learn French and collaborate.

Glenn

And did you see the post in that same thread with the link to the spreadsheet giving three separate, note-note tunings for a Steinway B? Along with Kawais and Yamaha's and other Steinways...Do you by any chance know how to create tuning files in Scala? Since the file is a spreadsheet, it might be relatively simple to copy and paste each piano's settings for a Scala file. Much easier than dragging the bars in the Detune pane.

I'll post the file as a preset later today. But I've only taken it as far as I can--I need help. It's hard for me to judge the result after to listening to each note for so long.

We wouldn't want to distract, would we?

Agreed.  How are you getting on with your streched tuning data?  Do you still need someone to look at the Steinway M?

Creating pianos is complex, delicate work, as is crafting software and attending to the needs of people who constantly want changes in both the pianos and software. We wouldn't want to distract, would we?

The breath noise is bands of oscillating sine waves in groups, say partials 20-30 and a higher band of partials 50-80.  These meander around the spot frequencies in a semi-random fashion and the end result was designed to sound like air-sheet interaction.  Obviously in a pipe of this type, there is no excitation above about the 8th partial but this noise is vital for the "believability factor" and missing entirely from conventional additive synthesis, or in later incarnations of Bradford/Musicom, added in by using sampled noise.

There has *got* to be a better way of doing this than guesstimating/doing it by ear with additive synthesis though.

I'll try to find and upload a short doodle I did with a very rough-and-ready organ flute which is completely synthetic; no samples or analysis of samples were used to make it, but to clarify, what you'll hear *is* in sample form, replayed through Hauptwerk.  Hopefully at least someone would find it "realistic." 

The biggest challenge (other than the developer giving up and abandoning the project) with creating sounds so vivid and "raw" is getting even reasonable loops.  This is why I'm convinced that working real-time is the way forward.