Mechanical Fidelity

This post is the first of many to come that will be little snippets of thesis-related thought. I’m focusing on a series of objects, people, and practices from the long and weird history of player pianos, and these blurbs are what come out. They’re in no particular order, and they might not make sense individually (although I hope they do). Comments on any aspect are welcomed!

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Mechanical Fidelity

[photo ©Mark Manring]

Zenph Studios has a peculiar business model. From their website:

Zenph® Studios takes audio recordings and turns them back into live performances, precisely replicating what was originally recorded. Our software-based process extracts every musical nuance of a recorded performance, and stores the data in a high-resolution digital file. These re-performance files contain the details of how every note in the composition was played, including pedal actions, volume, and articulations – all with millisecond timings.

These digital files are played back on modern player pianos and recorded for sale. Zenph focuses on recreating the original operation of the piano—improvements to recording technology ensure that the new recording will be an improvement over the old. However, the idea of “re-performance” and the relationship between player pianos and acoustic recording have a long history.

The first player pianos played “metronomic” rolls, arranged from sheet music with the aid of a ruler. To make these rolls sound more expressive, pianolas featured a variety of tempo and dynamic controls to be operated by the user. Reproducing pianos automated these controls, using rolls created not from sheet music, but from live performance.

Player piano manufacturer Welte copyrighted the term “reperforming piano” in 1924 to refer to their line of pianos especially made to play rolls recorded by a live pianist. The other major player brands, Ampico and Duo-Art, had “re-enacting piano” and “reproducing piano” as trademarks for similar devices, but soon enough, all self-playing pianos with automated expression functionality were known as reproducing pianos, to be contrasted with the slightly-less-automated pianola (another former trademark wrenched thoroughly into common, unspecific usage).

[image via the Pianola Institute, note the technician at left tracking volume on two dials]

Special recording pianos were developed to capture the timing of a real pianist, and various strategies emerged for capturing the dynamics of their performance, from complex setups involving spark chronographs to simple ones like having an assistant take notes on loudness during the recording. (Occasionally, the performer himself would be responsible for marking dynamics, but only after he had already played the piece, strangely allowing the publisher to claim that the roll represented the “complete performance” of the pianist while actually splitting that performance into two distinct acts of inscription.)

Reproducing pianos reinserted the performer as virtuoso into mechanical music. As an ad for Sergei Rachmaninoff’s rolls for the Ampico piano suggested,

When the Ampico plays, it is just as if the hands of the artists were actually touching the keys. The same strings are vibrating identically as they vibrated when Rachmaninoff himself controlled them.

The listener was not just to marvel at Rachmaninoff’s ability to play the piano, but to imagine the exact moment at which he played it, recreated in the present with impeccable precision through mechanical means. The gramophone’s contemporary claims to fidelity were always limited by the fact that sounds cut to disc and emitted from a cone took on characteristics unrelated to their original sources. The piano, on the other hand, always sounded like a piano. Instead of focusing on the qualities of sound in the air, the critical listener had to focus on the quality of machine operation.

While acoustic recordings had to grapple with the still-developing scientific understanding of sound in air, sound on disc, and sound in the ear, reproducing piano recordings had an ostensibly simpler task: a complete accounting of the variables in a human-made machine. Once all possible degrees of freedom were accounted for, the implicitly inevitable result would be the perfect reproduction of pianistic expression. The question of fidelity was relocated from the ear to the hands—”How did Rachmaninoff sound?” was replaced by “How did Rachmaninoff play?”

This relocation, more specifically, was from the listener’s ear to the performer’s hands. Listening was a phenomenon of the natural world, the subject of biological and physical inquiry. Performance, on the other hand, could be seen as a glorified kind of mechanical operation. Virtuoso pianists were expert machine operators, their abilities completely constrained by the parameters of their machine. Fidelity for the player piano meant reproducing not sound, but virtuosity.

Zenph’s concern with reproducing performance shares in this history. Even though its primary business is in making acoustic recordings for sale, Zenph focuses on the motions of the original performer as the site of reproduction. The acoustic recording is implicitly transparent here (although quite thought out by Zenph—more on that later). With all the focus on the reproducing of piano action, the listener is led to listen through the recording: to examine mechanical fidelity through acoustic reproduction.