Truesound
An organ consists of two basic kinds of pipes: flue pipes, and reed pipes. Flue pipes generate sound just like a recorder, forcing an envelope of air to oscillate over a sharp edge and giving the resulting vibration in the air column a pitch based on the length of the pipe. Reed pipes consist of a resonator attached to a small box called a boot that always holds some kind of thin metal reed (C) which vibrates under the air pressure within the boot. Historically, these metal reeds were made of copper alloys that - until now - have been little studied and understood, and may have different properties than modern alloys. When a reed in an important historical organ breaks, or is lost, a part of the true soundscape of the original organ is lost with it.
The TRUESOUND project attempted to identify the alloy compositions of reed tongues in historical organs, and develop the processes necessary to reproduce these alloys and finally produce reed tongues according to the reseacrh results for restorations or replica instruments in order to test whethr they have the same material properties as the historical reeds.