Pisa baptistry is giant musical instrument, computers show

 Rory Carroll in Rome

 The Guardian, Thursday 2 December 1999 01.01 GMT

Italian musicologists have cracked a five century-old acoustic code to reveal that Christianity's largest baptistry is a musical instrument.

A computer analysis of the resonance inside the circular, marble structure at Pisa suggests that renaissance architects designed it to mimic the pipes of a church organ. The acoustics beneath the 75-metre cupola are so perfect that it must be either an incredible coincidence or the work of genius, scholars say.

Recordings of the walls' responses to even the faintest of noises have been processed by mathematical models to unlock the secret of how the architects used angles to manipulate sound.

Preparations are under way to perform a symphony beneath the cupola to test whether it succeeds in turning the Piazza dei Miracoli, which includes Pisa's leaning tower and cathedral, into a giant concert hall.

A successful experiment would reinforce claims that the 15th century architects who added the cupola to the baptistry built in 1152 intended to create a wonder not just of aesthetics, but acoustics.

Baptistry attendants often earn tips by singing for tourists who marvel at the echoes, but until now it was widely assumed that the acoustics were a fluke. The building was better known for a marble pulpit carved in 1260 by Nicola Pisano, the father of Giovanni.

Leonello Tarabella, a music professor at the University of Pisa, teamed up two years ago with Silvano Burgalassi, a Catholic priest who has written a book about the piazza, to investigate the acoustics.

"There is music that can exist only in this place and we intend to create it. The resonance, the vibrations, are incredible," Professor Tarabella said.

If money can be found in time the concert will be held on June 24, when the leaning tower, held up by enormous braces for seven years, is to be declared officially straightened - that is, tilting fractionally less and shored up.

On that day every year a ray of sunlight shines through a small hole in the baptistry wall and illuminates a statue of John the Baptist.

Why the organ really is king of musical instruments

Listening to Llandaff Cathedral's new organ has converted me to the instrument's thrilling possibilities

Organs: the king of instruments, according to some. To be honest, the cult of the organ has never turned me on, with its cloistered virtuosos plying their trade in darkened cathedrals, reading their copies of Choir & Organ and fiddling with their stops, pedals, keyboard racks and 16-footers. But there's also a combination of servility and megalomania that puts off all but a charmed circle of organophiles.

As so often with these preconceptions, built up over years of misunderstanding, it's only when you confront them head on that you learn the error of your ways. My Damascene moment came on a journey to Llandaff Cathedral near Cardiff, where I was going for this week's Music Matters on BBC Radio 3 (on which, by the way, you can also hear more about the composer Carlo Gesualdo). Over Easter, Richard Moorhouse will play the cathedral's brand-new organ for public worship. Built by Nicholson's of Malvern, this is the largest organ to be unveiled in the UK since Coventry Cathedral's in the early 1960s.

As I entered Llandaff's grand gothic nave, the giant instrument was being tuned by James Atherton, a Metallica and Mozart-loving former drummer and now expert organ surgeon. There's a fantastic physicality about working with organ pipes – 4870 of them, in the case of Llandaff, distributed on either side of the choir. To reach them, you have to walk inside the organ's 10-metre-high cases, up ladders and through passageways, navigating the labyrinthine bowels of the instrument. Each pipe has to be precisely calibrated by moving strips of metal or wood – with all the delicacy of a jeweller for the tiniest and highest pipes (each the size of a pencil), and by tearing off leaves of lead and tin for the lowest notes. These low, 32ft pipes make an extraordinary sound, more like a pneumatic drill than a musical note – a celestial farting at the very bottom of your hearing range.

The fact that Llandaff has a new organ, rather than an endlessly repaired and renovated one (as with the majority of Britain's cathedrals) is down to decades of bad luck. Bombed during the war, the organ fell victim to years of make-do-and-mend before a lightning strike in 2007, which destroyed what was left of it. The cathedral and the community around Llandaff raised the £1.5m needed for a new instrument.

It's been worth it. Moorhouse described the organ as unashamedly of the tradition of Romantic English instruments, but hearing him play one of Widor's symphonies for the solo organ (from the grand French tradition of organ music) was thrilling. His performance made me forget about the arcana of the organ-playing world and converted me to the majesty of the instrument.