Reed Sort
Don’t you just love jigsaw puzzles? I don’t. I’ve only ever done them out of selflessness or spite.
But what if, instead of interlocking pieces in a two dimensional grid (if you’re lucky), each piece was smooth. Instead of aligning tabs and a picture (if you’re lucky), each piece is instead had a similar resonance to its neighbours. And what if, instead of a two dimensional puzzle, it’s one dimensional. There aren’t any corners, but on the other hand, it’s all edges.
These are the reeds from an American Pump Organ. Pump Organ reeds have this lovely round nose. It’s to help them glide into their slots, and come out for tuning.
They were installed in an organ at least hundred years ago. But how did they come to be jumbled up in this bag, all out of order? And where is the organ?
Don’t wory. They will be in order again soon. But sadly the organ won’t be, it’s long gone. Don’t blame me.
Now I know what you’re thinking, or will be by the end of this video. Each reed has the pitch stamped on it. So you just need to find C, C#, D, D# and so on, then the job is done.
But it’s not so simple. When you buy a set of reeds from a stranger on the internet, you don’t know if it’s a complete set, if there are bits missing, or if it’s a mixture of sets. They probably don’t know either.
So they need sorting. I find this a relaxing, meditative practice, so I though I’d share it with you.
It’s a gentle puzzle. If you watched it in reverse you’d probably be shouting at the screen that it was obvious. For this reason I have chosen to play the video forwards.
But it’s not obvious. You only get to find out at the end if it was a complete set, or parts.
And there’s more than one factor that determines the pitch of the reed, and therefore position in the scale. The length and width of the tongue play a role, as well as the thickness.
Even two reeds that have the same marking, and which look similar, might duplicates be from different sets. Or they might be an octave apart.
Each one has the note stamped in tiny writing. It’s not easy to tell though, as the reeds have a century of muck and corrosion. The C and G look similar, and E and F are easy to mix up.
As we go, it becomes clear that there are some duplicates.
Eventually groups form and merge.
As predicted, the final arrangement does indeed look obvious. But it wasn’t obvious until the end.
My philosophical argument with jigsaws isn’t that they take a long time, or require hard work. It’s not even that you end up with something entirely pointless at the end. It’s that the nature of it is deliberately adversarial and antagonistic.
And that’s a shame. The process of building clusters and then gradually merging them together into a cohesive whole is a very rewarding process. There’s no need to add extra hurdles that you can boast about on the box.
Eventually I ended up with a contiguous 5 and a half octave set at the top.
And at the botton we have a handful of bass notes, and a two-and-a-half octave set.
I’d argue that the finished product is vastly more interesting and useful than a completed puzzle. Even if it one depicting, as the best jigsaws do, exceptionally fluffy cats.