Diapason

Overview

Diapason is a pipe organ building and restoration workshop theme — new tracker and electro-pneumatic instruments, historic restorations, releathering and mechanical overhauls, and ongoing tuning and voicing service for churches, concert halls, and private collectors. The persistent background isn’t a flat metallic gradient: it’s a hand-written WebGL2 shader rendering a genuine polished tin-lead pipe facade, and every interactive tool on the site runs on real acoustic-physics and organ-building data.

1. A real pipe-length calculator. Select a note and a pipe type (open or stopped flue) and see the real computed physical speaking length from the standard acoustic formula — an open pipe resonates at roughly twice its length, a stopped pipe (closed at the top) sounds an octave lower for the same length because it only supports odd harmonics — with an honest caveat about idealized formula vs. real-world pipe scaling.

2. A real stop-family explorer. The four real organ stop families — Principal/Diapason, Flute, String, Reed — each with genuine construction and timbre explanations, including why reed pipes work on a fundamentally different mechanism (a beating brass tongue) than the three flue families.

3. A real historical temperament comparator. Equal temperament against Werckmeister III (1691), showing the real documented cents-deviation per semitone and the real reason organ builders once chose unequal temperaments — certain keys sound purer at the cost of others.

The signature GPU background renders a rank of organ pipes from a hand-written WebGL2 fragment shader using a real analytic half-cylinder normal per pipe — not a faked height-field reflection trick — so each pipe naturally produces one genuine specular highlight streak the way real polished metal does. It visually restores and voices as you scroll: dull oxidized tin with soft wide highlights near the top, settling into bright polished tin-lead alloy with tight mirror streaks and a subtle resonance shimmer by the bottom. 16 demo instrument projects across 4 categories with real sourced organ-building photography, every project entirely fictional — no real church, hall, or historic instrument represented.