Every year there seems to be an increasing number of player pianos that
are being sent to the dump. Thousands upon thousands of piano rolls also
end up in the dump. There may consequently be some interest in a device
which will play piano rolls in real time.

MIDI files are a wonderful media but there is something magical about
seeing a piano roll create music. The MIDI output of such a piano roll
player could be sent to a digital piano, Hi-Fi system or any MIDI
controlled instrument.

Although not meant for archival scanning, such a unit could do a
reasonable job of creating MIDI files from a personal roll collection.
With Marc Sachnoff's encouragement I have fairly recently finished the
design and construction of a compact, freestanding real-time piano roll
player.

Perforations on a roll are read by a linear array of IR LEDs and photo-
detectors. The signals are then converted into MIDI by a commercially
available 96-note encoder. In addition to all the conventional controls
of Tempo, Volume, etc., there is adjustment for paper transparency,
snakebite intensity boost, and transpose. Along with an auto or manual
sustain function there is also a de-bridging function to ensure that
long notes do not play as a series of staccato notes.

Although the design is not quite complete, I have posted this link to
a video clip to see how much interest there might be in such a unit:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_VyYsTygNSHPLwRMRrIHSWFVvydB1nnM/view?usp=sharing 

Phil Dayson
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
pdayson@gmail.com.geentroep [delete ".geentroep" to reply]