Player piano
A player piano (also known as a pianola) is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism, that operates the piano action via programmed music recorded on perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls, with more modern implementations using MIDI. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sales peaked in 1924, then declined, as the improvement in phonograph recordings due to electrical recording methods developed in the mid-1920s. The advent of electrical amplification in home  music reproduction via radio in the same period helped cause their eventual decline in popularity, and the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production. Predecessors. As of 1876, in Philadelphia, United States, three working devices were exhibited, that between them, contained almost all the components that the final player piano would require. However, it was to be 20 years before all these aspects were combined. Surprisingly, the missing component was the pneumatic reading of the roll. This was, in all probability, due to the lack of suitably flexible airtight material to translate the air flow into the mechanical  movement needed to trigger the player device. It was Edwin S. Votey who invented, in 1896, the first practical pneumatic piano player, called the Pianola. This mechanism finally came into widespread use in the 20th century, and was all-pneumatic, with foot-operated bellows providing a source of vacuum needed to operate a pneumatic motor, driving the take-up spool, while each small inrush of air through a hole in the paper roll was amplified in two pneumatic stages (the so-called double valve mechanism), to sufficient strength to strike a loud note. Development. 1900–1910. The Pianola was advertised in  one of the highest-profile campaigns ever, making unprecedented use of full-page color advertisements. It cost $250 (). Other, cheaper makes were launched. A standard 65-note format evolved, with rolls and holes spaced 6 to the inch, although several player manufacturers used their own form of roll incompatible with other makes. Huge sums were spent: by 1903, the Aeolian Company had more than 9,000 roll titles in their catalog, adding 200 titles per month. Many companies' catalogs ran to thousands of rolls, mainly of light, religious or classical music. Ragtime music did feature, but not commonly: in this  period, the player was being sold on its artistic capabilities to rich buyers. The pioneer of this decade was Melville Clark, who introduced two key ideas: the full-scale roll which could play every note on the piano keyboard, and the internal player as standard. Both ideas were ridiculed by his competitors as unnecessary or impractical, but Clark rapidly won both battles. By the end of the decade, the piano player device was obsolete, as was the 65-note format. This was a major catastrophe for many small manufacturers, who had spent all their capital on setting up 65-note  player operations, and the result was rapid consolidation in the industry. A new full-scale roll format, playing all 88 notes, was agreed at an industry conference in Buffalo, New York in 1908, the so-called Buffalo Convention. This kept the 11¼-inch roll, but now had smaller holes spaced at 9 to the inch. Any player made anywhere in the world could now play any make of roll. Understanding the need for compatibility was the defining moment of the player industry. The consensus was key to avoiding a costly format war, which plagued almost every other form of entertainment media  that followed roll music. While the player piano matured in America, a young inventor in Germany, Edwin Welte, was working on a player which would reproduce all the aspects of the performance automatically, so that his machine would play back a recorded performance exactly as if the original pianist were sitting at the piano keyboard. Known as a Reproducing Piano, this device, the Welte-Mignon, was launched in 1904. It created new marketing opportunities, as manufacturers could now get the foremost pianists and composers of the day to record their performances on a piano roll, allowing owners of player pianos  to experience such a performance in their own homes on their own instruments, exactly as the original pianist had played it. From the early days, manufacturers sought to create mechanisms which would pick out the melody of a musical composition over the background of the rest of the music in the same manner as a live pianist. The true player piano was designed to be a fully interactive musical experience rather than merely an automatic instrument, and hence they are fitted with interactive control levers intended for the "player pianist" or "pianolist" to create a music performance to their own  taste. The player piano would provide aspiring pianists and music lovers with the technical dexterity they lacked while permitting them to control the musical performance interactively as if they were an accomplished pianist. Aeolian introduced Metrostyle in 1901 and the Themodist in 1904, the latter being an invention "bringing out the melody clearly above the accompaniment." With sales growing rapidly, and the instruments themselves relatively mature, this decade saw a wider variety of rolls become available. Two major advances were the introduction of the hand-played roll, both classical and popular, and the word roll. The other major advance was  the arrival in America of two major commercial rivals for the Welte-Mignon Reproducing Piano: the Ampico (from 1911 but fully 're-enacting' by 1916) and the Duo-Art (1914). Artrio-Angelus also introduced a reproducing player from 1916. When World War I came in 1914, German patents were seized in the US. In England, Aeolian had a huge factory and sales network, so easily outsold the Ampico. Other makers of Reproducing systems were successful in Europe: Hupfeld Meisterspiel DEA (1907) and Philipps Duca (c 1909). Hupfeld perfected an 88 note reproducing system, the Triphonola, in 1919 It is estimated  that perhaps 5% of players sold were Reproducing Pianos. In America by the end of the decade, the new 'jazz age' and the rise of the fox-trot confirmed the player piano as the instrument of popular music, with classical music increasingly relegated to the reproducing piano. Most American roll companies stopped offering large classical catalogs before 1920, and abandoned 'instrumental' rolls (those without words) within a few years. Things were somewhat different in England, where the Aeolian Company continued to promote classical material to a receptive public. Word rolls never became the norm in England, always being charged at  a 20% premium over non-word rolls. As a result, post-World War I American and British roll collections look very different. 1950–present. During the early 1950s, a number of collectors began to rescue player pianos and all the other instruments of the 1920s and earlier. Among them was Frank Holland, who formed his collection while working in Canada. On returning to England he located a number of like-minded enthusiasts and started to hold meetings at his house in west London. In 1959 this was formalized as 'The Player Piano Group'. By the early 1960s, Frank Holland had  formed the British Piano Museum (now the Musical Museum) in Brentford. In America, another collector was Harvey Roehl, who was so enthused by the players that in 1961 he published a book called "Player Piano Treasury". This sold by the tens of thousands, and was followed by books on how to rebuild and restore these instruments. Harvey Roehl's Vestal Press was a major driving force in raising awareness of the player piano within the general population. Other societies worldwide were formed to preserve and study all aspects of mechanical music, such as the Musical Box Society International (MBSI) and  the Automatic Musical Instruments Collector's Association (AMICA) in the USA. In 1961, Max Kortlander died of a heart attack, and QRS was run by his wife until she sold the company to Ramsi Tick in 1966, in whom it found another stalwart champion whose business philosophy was not so much profit as to limit losses. QRS's presence ensured that owners of newly awakened players could purchase rolls of the latest titles, so ensuring that the instrument remained current, not just a historical curiosity. So great was the revival that in the 1960s, production of player pianos started again . Aeolian revived the Pianola, albeit this time in a small spinet piano suited to post-war housing. Other manufacturers followed, and production has continued intermittently ever since. QRS today offers a traditional player piano in its Story and Clark piano. In recent years, there has been greater focus on full rebuilding as original instruments finally stop working. Early enthusiasts could often get by with limited patching, but the repair requirements have slowly risen, although even to this day it is possible to find original 1920s instruments that still work after a fashion a tribute to their quality, and an indication  of their continued popularity. Types. While there are many minor differences between manufacturers, a player piano is a piano that contains a manually controlled pneumatically operating piano player mechanism. It is intended that the operator manually manipulates the control levers in order to produce a musical performance. Various aids to the human operator were developed: Music rolls. Music rolls for pneumatic player pianos, often known as piano rolls, consist of a continuous sheet of paper rolled on to a spool. The spool fits into the player piano spool box whereupon the free end of the music sheet is hooked onto  the take-up spool which will unwind the roll at an even pace across the reading mechanism (the "tracker bar") The music score to be played is programmed onto the paper by means of perforations. Different player systems have different perforation sizes, channel layouts and spool fittings though the majority conform to one or two predominant formats latterly adopted as the industry standard. Music is programmed via a number of methods. The player piano sold globally in its heyday, and music rolls were manufactured extensively in the US, as well as most European countries, South America, Australia and New Zealand . A large number of titles from all manufacturers survive to this day, and rolls still turn up regularly in large quantities. It was reported that the last remaining mass producer of piano rolls in the world, QRS Music, temporarily halted production of the rolls on December 31, 2008. However, QRS Music still list themselves as the only roll manufacturer remaining, and claim to have 45,000 titles available with "new titles being added on a regular basis". The Musical Museum in Brentford, London, England houses a nationally significant collection of piano rolls, with over 20,000 rolls, as well as an extensive  collection of instruments which may be seen and heard. Modern implementations. Later developments of the reproducing piano include the use of magnetic tape and floppy disks, rather than piano rolls, to record and play back the music; and, in the case of one instrument made by Bösendorfer, computer assisted playback. In 1982, Yamaha Corporation introduced the "Piano Player", which was the first mass-produced, commercially available reproducing piano that was capable of digitally capturing and reproducing a piano performance using floppy disk as a storage medium. The Piano Player was replaced in 1987 by the Yamaha Disklavier and since 1998 , the Disklavier PRO models are capable of capturing and reproducing "high-resolution" piano performances of up to 1024 velocity levels and 256 increments of positional pedaling using Yamaha's proprietary XP (Extended Precision) MIDI specification. Almost all modern player pianos use MIDI to interface with computer equipment. Most modern player pianos come with an electronic device that can record and playback MIDI files on floppy disks and/or CD-ROMs, and a MIDI interface that enables computers to drive the piano directly for more advanced operations. The MIDI files can trigger electromechanical solenoids, which use electric current to drive small mechanical  plungers mounted to the key action inside the piano. Live performance or computer generated music can be recorded in MIDI file format for accurate reproduction later on such instruments. MIDI files containing converted antique piano-rolls can be purchased on the Internet. , several player piano conversion kits are available (PianoDisc, PNOmation, etc.), allowing the owners of normal pianos to convert them into computer controlled instruments. The conversion process usually involves cutting open the bottom of the piano to install mechanical parts under the keyboard, although one organization—Logos Foundation—has manufactured a portable, external kit. A new player piano conversion  kit was introduced in 2007-08 by Wayne Stahnke, the inventor of the Bösendorfer SE reproducing system, called the "LX". Steinway now manufactures a player piano based on Wayne Stahnke's Live Performance LX system. Live Performance Model LX, was sold to Steinway in 2014 and re-branded as Spirio. In contrast to other piano brands, a recording option was not originally available in Steinway Spirio pianos. However, in 2019 Steinway introduced the Spirio | r, which is capable of both reproducing and recording piano music for later playback. Edelweiss is a British upcomer on the player piano market offering  totally bespoke pianos, available in luxury department store Harrods since 2017 and according to the "Financial Times" YouTube channel 'How to Spend it', Edelweiss is "regarded as the most upmarket of today's breed of the self-playing piano". Comparison to electric pianos. A player piano is neither an electric piano, electronic piano, nor a digital piano. The distinction between these instruments lies in the way sounds are produced. A player piano is an acoustic piano where the sound is produced by hammer strikes on the piano strings. Electrical or electronic components are limited to moving the keys or hammers  mimicking the actions of a person; no sound is produced from electrically amplified audio.