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Inton – a system for in-situ measurement of the pipe organ

Guštar, Milan and Otčenášek, Zdeněk 

The article presents the design and capabilities of the Inton measurement system. The system is developed in MARC Prague for an in-situ repeatable unbiased acoustical documentation of sound condition of pipe organs and for the analysis of the organ pipe sounds in the process of organ building and voicing. The organ sound documentation is independent on the precise actual placing of the microphones in the space. In addition to the usual review of spectra of the individual pipes the system allows to evaluate balance of the tone sound quality within registers of an organ, to discover out-of-tendency tones and to asses the room acoustic parameters from the point of view of an organ position in the space without any other equipment. The system consists of a microphone set, microphone pre-amplifiers, A/D converters and two laptop computers with special software. The system was already used for the subsequent objective and/or subjective evaluations and comparisons of documented sounds after a long time pause. Some organ builders in CZ employ Inton as a tool in various stages of the organ building or restoration techniques. The Inton measurement of room acoustics using the pipe organ as a sound source is used at present in a research project to extend the Inton utilities.