I meant to comment on this post. where is your place based?
Near San Francisco. I am about 25 miles North East, and the Hall with most of the instruments is halfway between SF and Sacramento in the delta.
I was also curious about the player rolls for the organ. I knew there were rolls produced because I’d read about the famous Roxy Theater installation in NY in the 20’s where the foyer organ had a roll unit fitted. As a restorer of player pianos here in Melbourne I have a related interest.
Were the rolls particularly different in concept?
There are dozens of different player roll formats. Curiously most of the research comes from Australia. We probably have some mutual acquaintances then.
One of the larger Australian collections was purchased by Stanford University. The next academic conference will be down under. The last one was in Switzerland (what revived my interest in watches.) About 1/3 of the participants were from Australia.
Most of the roll playing formats are for piano. The idea was to capture the performance as accurately as possible. The air pressure measured digitally with literal binary weights. Efforts to study this use Bayesian estimators and phase locked loops. These are also the foundations of modern AI (also called expert systems.)
When dealing with pipe organs something called multiplexing is used. The same technology was used for early telegraph and telephone calls. Since this used a magnetic switch. These were called relays or switches. Such things can be quite complex. This is where I usually refer the interested person to look up the brothers Robert and Frank Hope Jones. If some of this sounds like network routers one is not too far off.
Skip ahead to Hedy Lamar. Paper tapes and rolls were used to log stock market results. Also telegraph conversation the machine that typed the flimsy delivered to recipiant. There were early terminals called teletypes. Such machine could also used to create form letters. They could also be used to encrypt codes. The enigma was such a device.
The center of this was Upstate New York. Wurlitzer was in North Tonawanda. That is where Frank Hope Jones settled and created his 'Unit orchestra.'
I have remains one of the player units, such as was used in the Roxy theater.
This is the vacuum switch stack. There was also a roll transport.
I used these parts in my Calliope. So like a parts movement these are no longer together. I used part of the vacuum stack in the instrument above in this thread.
The rolls are quite rare. Most were scrapped. Other manufactures used similar rolls. Here is one of the scales documented by Robert Morton which was a competitor to Wurlitzer.
This show some of the complex multiplexing. There are 105 holes on the paper. The instrument might have 800 inputs and 2000 outputs.
What rolls survived come from Death Valley. A place called Scotty's Castle. In the 1980s the rolls were copied and duplicate player units were created. A side effect of the duplication was to create MIDI files (which can be used as mastering rolls.) I have a set of these rolls.
Sometimes old instruments are found walled up in old mansion and theaters. They were quite popular with society ladies in the Guided age. With boom/bust such instruments were also exported to bring civilization to places where there were gold strikes such as California, The Yukon and Australia.
With modern systems this data can be played on emulators.
The Merry-Go-Round organs and Calliopes used a similar multiplexed system. This gave rise to the term "Includes all the bells and whistles." Amusement parks like D land and Knots berry farm resurrected these in the 1960s. There were a lot of smaller roadside attractions such as House on the rock. This tech also gave rise to the jukebox. All that multiplexed switching to drop the needle onto the records precisely. Interesting to think this is a form of AI. Some could even play violins!
I looked up to see what the AI breakthrough was early this week. No breakthrough. It is simply that we are at the critical predicted point where all these switches and relays can somewhat program themselves. It is still the same Bayesian estimators and phase locked loops.
Also interesting to consider that in the 18th century mechanical played music technology could be scaled small enough to fit into rings and watches. (using pinned barrels.) The common striking repeater watch mass produced in the 19th century. Even last year Omega did a variation with their Chronostrike or what ever it was called.
