The wife wouldn’t come down and help me carry the player piano home. I took the Poppy dog out for her first walk to the park and there it was—just sitting on the corner of 58th and the Westside Highway.
I have been thinking about player pianos a lot lately because of their programmability. This feeder allows you to program music into sheets that are fed into the player, executing a tune physically via the piano keys. Putting down a foundation for how things can be programmed 200 years ago.
I loved studying the gears and chains that kept the music playing moving the software but also the hardware forward to deliver a tune. I will have to pull the patents held by this company to understand the design better, but it is interesting to think about how holes punched into paper can be used to turn gears and press the black and white keys.
US Patent Number 1055323 - “noted for tone, touch, and durability”. I wonder how many different songs it could play, and where you purchased the music? I’ve been studying looms from this century, and have wanted to spend more time learning about player pianos, and I think this was a sign from the automation gawds.
There is a regular piano in there, but there is this whole apparatus on top of it for translating the music punched into the paper into physical pushing of the keys. I lifted up the cover on the keys, and played the Jaws tune, which is the only song I ever learned. I guess I knew Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but have forgotten it all these years.
I messaged Audrey to come help carry it because Poppy wasn’t much help. Granted she just had surgery and shouldn’t be lifting pianos. Oh well, I took a whole bunch of pictures, and documented the company and patent so that can I look into it further. Then maybe I can find where I can go learn more about this company and their pianos, or maybe other pianos.
I’d like to understand the history of the player piano in general and what inspiration came from the loom and other automata of the time. I’d also like to learn more about how and why they fell out of fashion and what musicians actually thought of them. Player pianos are an interesting relic of this time period, and an artifact from computer programming history that I don’t think gets a lot of attention.
People love to showcase Babbage’s different engine, but it is about managing human bodies, and specifically black and brown bodies, so I am not that interested in holding it up and showcasing it. The loom and player piano provide a much more interesting look at how we programmed the technology around us. It provides a look at using punch cards or more specifically rolled up punched paper to program something. I am guessing like other programmable and automated technology, it was pretty revolutionary, groundbreaking, but also problematic in its time.
