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Player piano
11 years ago
Might not be anything new to anyone out there, but...
I got my old music equipment all set up and running, and while testing it out I came across some archives of old player piano rolls that had been scanned and digitized into MIDI. Sort of a revival of old technology into new, spanning a century. Player Pianos and music boxes were really the first stages of music recording, since nothing capable of capturing actual sound waves existed until the 1920s, after which they pushed player pianos out of the market. And, many of the composers of the popular piano tunes of the time were the ones recorded by the player piano. Essentially, every keypress of their live performance was captured, so now 100 years later it's like having the ghosts of Gershwin or Joplin or whoever performing "live" in your studio. Better than a recording, actually, since you can get real, clear, live audio from now using primitive data from then. Anyways i thought it was neat, so I'll probably make some actual recordings of the results and post them in the next few days.
I got my old music equipment all set up and running, and while testing it out I came across some archives of old player piano rolls that had been scanned and digitized into MIDI. Sort of a revival of old technology into new, spanning a century. Player Pianos and music boxes were really the first stages of music recording, since nothing capable of capturing actual sound waves existed until the 1920s, after which they pushed player pianos out of the market. And, many of the composers of the popular piano tunes of the time were the ones recorded by the player piano. Essentially, every keypress of their live performance was captured, so now 100 years later it's like having the ghosts of Gershwin or Joplin or whoever performing "live" in your studio. Better than a recording, actually, since you can get real, clear, live audio from now using primitive data from then. Anyways i thought it was neat, so I'll probably make some actual recordings of the results and post them in the next few days.
One was simple key press, and the other was referred to as a "recording Roll" where it recorded other data and gave a more lifelike performance. I remember there was a revival for player Pianos int he late 1960'sand early 1970's, and heard a lot of them play. This should be good.
Seriously, I'm pretty amped though.
http://www.qrsmusic.com/default.asp
Remeber the pianola? It allowed an operator to control the tempo and volume of a standard piano roll and inject some life into it.