Computer to Cardboard - arranging music for the 32 keyless street organ
Channel: Tavola Montana
Date: 2020-04-18

How music is arranged for a small hand-turned cardboard book playing pipe organ. 

This short documentary describes how a piece of music is arranged on computer and cut using a foot-treadle operated cardboard book punching machine, to be played on the organ.

This video was created by all four members of our family:
John arranged, cut and played the music on the organ
Rosie filmed and photographed the process
Anna wrote the script and edited the video
Eleanor provided the narration

a Page Family Production
April 2020

This video is shared with a Creative Commons Licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ CC. 
Please attribute your use of this video as follows:
Computer to Cardboard, John and Anna Page, https://youtu.be/2_l6zu33ZaM CC BY-SA-NC 4.0

You can find out more about Tavola Montana, the 32 keyless hand-turned pipe organ and how it was built by visiting http://www.johnpage.co.uk/organs/new/32kl/32-1.htm
Tavola Montana has a Facebook page, where occasionally the music is live streamed.

Transcript:
Computer to cardboard – arranging music for the 32 keyless street organ
It takes many hours to arrange one piece of music for a small street organ so the arrangement does justice to the music within the limitations of the scale, which is not fully chromatic.
The music can be arranged on paper, the method used for original mechanical organs since the cardboard book playing organ was invented by Gavioli of Paris in 1892.
Now it is possible to arrange music using a computer. 
The computer music arranging method for the 32 keyless street organ uses four different pieces of software:
PhotoScore, 
Sibelius, 
Noteur and 
Midiboek
PhotoScore is used to convert sheet music into SIB files for Sibelius. 
Errors in scanning are visually corrected in PhotoScore before transfer to Sibelius.
Sibelius music software is used to create a MIDI file of the arrangement. 
This can be from a PDF file of an existing arrangement which usually has to be adjusted to fit the limits of the scale. 
The organ only has three base notes (C, F, G) and does not have C# or D# or G# in the scale.
If the MIDI file has a note range greater than the organ scale, high notes will need to be lowered and low notes raised. 
The melody sometimes needs altering to fit, while retaining the general feel of the original tune.
The MIDI file is opened in Noteur software to fine tune the arrangement in note layout format for the organ.
This is usually when parts of the tune or counter-melody are moved to different sections of the organ, for example to the trumpet section, or when the forte register is added.
The Noteur arrangement is printed out via Midiboek on sheets of paper.
These sheets of paper are trimmed to size and laid over the card one by one. 
The music card is punched using a foot treadle operated card punching machine.
The holes are punched through the paper and card to make the notes.
When there are repeats in the music the already punched paper sheets are used as stencil guides.
Sometimes, if a mistake is made and a hole is punched in the wrong place, it is necessary to fill the hole with card, using one of the punched ‘holes’ and some glue.
Once the book of music has been cut, any stray bits of card are carefully removed and the backs of the folds are rubbed gently to flatten them.
A book cover is printed for the music with the title, composer, date of composition if known and arranger information.
The music is now ready to play on the organ.