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