The dying sound of a pipe organ is a piece of music no human ever composed. 🎶 💀 A pipe organ only makes sound while pressurized air is moving through its pipes. An electric blower feeds that air into a reservoir, a weighted bellows that works like a set of lungs and holds the wind pressure perfectly steady. Cut the power and the blower stops, but the reservoir keeps breathing into the pipes for a few more seconds while the pressure collapses. That collapse is what you hear. Organ pipes are so sensitive to wind pressure that any drop pulls their pitch flat, and every pipe slides and cuts out at its own rate. A clean chord smears into a long descending groan. For most of the organ’s 2,000-year history, this had nothing to do with electricity. Until the early 1900s the wind came from humans pumping the bellows by hand, and “organ blower” was a person’s job title long before it was a machine. When the pumper stopped, the instrument faded out exactly like this. The king of instruments...