Week 0 Blog: What's a Player Piano?

If you’ve seen a piano playing itself before, you may think that self playing pianos are a technological marvel of the digital age, however self-playing pianos a.k.a “Player Pianos” have been around for a long time. Player pianos first started showing up in America in the 1880’s, and were powered by a system of pneumatics powered by foot pedals. They were very common in households across the nation by the turn of the century, and people generally enjoyed using these pianos as a way to enjoy music without having to put in effort to learn how to play the instrument. However, they had a big problem in that they were expensive, difficult to move and difficult to repair. Because of these problems, most people stopped using them after the 1920’s and 30’s when better methods of playing music at home became more widespread. 

Modern electromechanical player pianos are available and solve some reliability issues that the old pneumatic ones had, however they are mostly sold by big name brands like Steinway and Yamaha for a very high price. (High enough that you have to call them to find out the price!) I plan to fix this problem by building a precise and well functioning player piano for relatively cheap (< 500$) using off the shelf components and by posting designs and instructions online to allow other people to replicate the player mechanism on their own pianos.

Personally, I have been fascinated by mechanical music machines including player pianos, coin pianos, fotoplayers, and more all my life. I believe that the sound quality produced by these machines is far superior to any sound produced by speakers or other means. I’ve already found a piano that I will be using for this project and I’ve begun fixing it up to get it to sound better. Hopefully by next week I’ll have some more information on the mechanism and circuits that I will use to bring this piano to life. For now, here are some pictures of the piano in its current state and as well as a video of me playing it so you can get a feel for the piano’s current sound: Image 1 Image 2 Image 3 Video