11 Facts About Player piano

Player piano is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism, that operates the piano action via programmed music recorded on perforated paper or metallic rolls, with more modern implementations using MIDI.

The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home, in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The true player piano was designed to be a fully interactive musical experience rather than merely an automatic instrument, and hence they are fitted with interactive control levers intended for the "player pianist" or "pianolist" to create a music performance to their own taste.

The player piano would provide aspiring pianists and music lovers with the technical dexterity they lacked while permitting them to control the musical performance interactively as if they were an accomplished pianist.

Player piano sold globally in its heyday, and music rolls were manufactured extensively in the US, as well as most European countries, South America, Australia and New Zealand.

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Later developments of the reproducing Player piano include the use of magnetic tape and floppy disks, rather than Player piano rolls, to record and play back the music; and, in the case of one instrument made by Bosendorfer, computer assisted playback.

In 1982, Yamaha Corporation introduced the "Piano Player", which was the first mass-produced, commercially available reproducing piano that was capable of digitally capturing and reproducing a piano performance using floppy disk as a storage medium.

The Piano Player was replaced in 1987 by the Yamaha Disklavier and since 1998, the Disklavier PRO models are capable of capturing and reproducing "high-resolution" piano performances of up to 1024 velocity levels and 256 increments of positional pedaling using Yamaha's proprietary XP MIDI specification.

The conversion process usually involves cutting open the bottom of the Player piano to install mechanical parts under the keyboard, although one organization—Logos Foundation—has manufactured a portable, external kit.

Steinway now manufactures a player piano based on Wayne Stahnke's Live Performance LX system.

Player piano is neither an electric piano, electronic piano, nor a digital piano.