Visually apparent to one watching the player piano operate are the printed lyrics to the song (they appear on the edge of the piano roll paper) a decided incentive to sing-alongs, a common entertainment modality when no radio or television existed. This excellent video starts by showing an early player piano’s “playing” of a piano roll, with the paper roll’s passing over its reader track and with the keys seemingly operating themselves and then delves into the creative design and manufacturing process. To understand this marvelous process from inception to completion and through the actual “performance” of the roll, one can do no better than to view this video by QRS Music Technologies (hereafter “”QRS”), the present iteration of one of this media’s founding companies. In actuality, an incredibly complex design and mechanical genius implemented during the late 19th Century created a system by which strategically-perforated and continuously-rolling paper, passing over a “reading” track mechanism and triggering vacuum-driven pneumatic operation of the player piano’s keys, generates exactly-reproduced piano music. The magic of a player piano (see, Ma, no hands!) is immediately apparent: the keys are literally playing themselves, or, if not, it would seem that a ghost pianist must be.
Perhaps the oldest of all the media on which Cy’s music is recorded, at least insofar as that media itself is a format for reproducing sound, is the player piano roll, the commercial use of which traces back to at least 1883.
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