The city planners of Zadar, Croatia have come up with a unique and harmonious way to meld their coastal city with the surrounding ocean. Designed by architect Nicola Basic, the Sea Organ (Morske Orgulje) encloses 35 underwater pipes that resonate musically from the lapping of the waves. The Sea Organ is located right along the water, underneath a series of long, elegant white stone steps where residents and tourists can sit and relax (photos by felber).
The Sea Organ is cleverly engineered to create musical notes from the motion of the ocean. When you properly blow into a hollow cylinder, such as a flute, a didgeridoo, or an empty beer bottle, you are inducing the air inside to vibrate at the object's resonant frequency. If it falls in the range of human hearing, this specific frequency is heard as a single musical note. The pipes in the Sea Organ are designed to resonate when water rushes into them, causing the air to be pushed upwards through the tubes. Ocean waves ebb and flow, making the pipes resonate frequently.
From a critical standpoint, why should ocean waves be turned into musical tones? Is the sound of breaking waves not soothing enough? Yet think about where ocean waves come from. Waves themselves are created in the open ocean by steady gusts of wind. The wind provides the driving force for water resonance in a very similar way that blowing across the opening of a flute provides the driving force for acoustic resonance. Thus, in a way, the sounds of the Sea Organ represent the winds across the open ocean, brought to the coastline encoded in waves of water, where they are re-released inside the organ's pipes. The organ draws attention to this environmental cycle.
The notes of the Sea Organ may be "played" randomly, but they are not arbitrary. The 35 pipes are separated into seven sections of five, where each section forms a chord of a diatonic scale. The five sections alternate two different but harmonious chords, G and C6. According to a paper by the Acoustical Society of Croatia, this arrangement was chosen to reflect the four-voice male singing tradition of the region.
Both photos of the Sea Organ were taken by felber, and the sound clip and diagram are from Oddmusic. Watch an interesting video about the organ from National Geographic, and you can even buy a 70 minute cd of Sea Organ sounds here.
Fascinating post; thanks for bringing this to our attention. Would love to visit at different times of the day to hear different tunes . . .
Posted by: Joyce | January 19, 2008 at 02:05 PM