DIGITAL ORGAN

   A keyboard instrument that may simulate the pipe organ in timbre and operation, whose tones are generated from large stores of computer samples of actual pipe organs, scaled through the pitch range, and projected through loudspeakers. The Allen Organ Co. demonstrated the first digital organ in 1971. The principal limitations on how closely the timbre approximates that of a pipe organ are the rate of sampling and the speaker technology. Advances in computer processing technology have enabled the storage of accurate wave envelopes, pipe release effects, sound environments, and other irregularities of actual pipe sound, so that the digital organ surpasses the electronic organ in its approximation of pipe organ timbre.

   See also Organ.