MIDI and Music Rolls in Germany
By Robbie Rhodes
Walter Tenten asked about paper for piano rolls in digest 960111, and just now I received a nice note from his collaborator, Horst Mohr. Along with Dr. Juergen Hocker, the president of the German Society for Selfplaying Music-instruments (GSM), they successfully connected a computer to control _two_ Ampico pianos, and presented in concert the Ampico rolls, "Study for 2 Pianos No. 40", by Conlon Nancarrow. (GSM journal, Aug '95)
As indicated in the letter below (slightly edited by me) the Germans haven't stopped to relax! Horst has programmed a PC which converts Ampico rolls (stored as a MIDI-file image) into standard MIDI with Ampico-emulation for his synthesizers: his "Electronic Ampico A". He also has written a program for printing templates, similar to the program Jody recently described.
Horst is new in Automatic-Music, and perhaps he is shy about writing to the group, but I feel that his accomplishments deserve dissemination "here and now".
Who is the tireless person who cuts all the little slots in the paper, Horst? Tell us more -- I'm impressed!
-- Robbie Rhodes
======= forwarded letter follows ======
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 20:11:03 MEZ
From: "Horst Mohr" <mohr@nemeter.dinoco.de>
To: rhodes@foxtail.com (Robbie Rhodes)
Hi Robbie,
I just managed to unzip and uudecode your Brasillian Maple Leaf. I'm just playing it on two synths and it sounds great! Sometimes I hear much more instruments than just 2 pianos!
The lyrics are displayed in Cakewalk; in Voyetra SPG only partially. The treble notes are playing on a Kurzweil micropiano and the bass on a Roland JV-880. They form together with a 200 watts amplifier and fairly good boxes the sounding part of my "electronic Ampico A" on which I play usually classic/romantic note rolls from Dr. Hocker.
I play them for storing as MIDI files for me. (As an equalization, I print noterolls on endless DIN A3 paper for him from MIDI files with modern compositions. The printing shows left and right border and the 98 rows as a stencil for punching.)
At the moment I am recording Symphony No.6 (Pathetic) Tschaikowsky , played by Suesskind and Loesser, conducted by Artur Bodanzky (4 rolls).
BTW, did you read my article in the GSM journal Nr.60 (May '94)? It is a description of my electronic note roll player and how I managed the optoelectronic task. If you want, I'll try to translate it to English. {Yes, we would like to hear about it.}
The electronic emulation of the Ampico's pneumatic in realtime works well, at least since the controlling computer is a '586/90, but there was already an article about it in the German Keyboards Magazine, June 1992, not from a technical but a musical point of view (a Musikwissenschaftler {music-theorist} wrote it). Then a '386/33 was controlling and emulating fairly good.
With best regards, h. m.
mohr@nemeter.dinoco.DE H. Mohr Koelnerstr.49 51515 Kuerten 02268/1561 |
(Message sent Fri 12 Jan 1996, 07:39:50 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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