Everything old is new again… well, not everything

One of the interesting side effects of the digital age in which we live has been the rapid obsolescence of any given data storage format. For instance (not to give my age away, but…) I only recently threw out a stack of old punch cards that I had used in my college years while learning FORTRAN. While it was tedious to edit those cards, they provided a cheap way of storing your FORTRAN program while also providing portability. I recall there even being a “computer center annex” in a building adjacent to the dorms at a college in Alabama, wherein resided an automatic card reader and a line printer. These venerable behemoths of the early computer age were connected as if by magic to the mainframe across campus by one single black telephone cable running point-to-point, terminated at each end by the black modem box (300 baud?) with the merrily blinking red lights. As you might expect, I was geek enough to have followed that cable every foot of its journey, from building to telephone pole, down the street in a hop-scotch from this pole to that, crossing overhead above the busy traffic, turning the corner and racing down the blocks ahead of me, to finally dive from the last pole and dash into the red brick side of the computer center.

But I digress. The point of all this was to illustrate the frailty of any given data storage format. And while my stack of punched cards seemed like a universal “write-once-read-anywhere” format that I could employ not only at the computer center but also at the remote job entry card reader (wow!), as you already know it’s quite difficult these days to find a reader for a stack of punched cards. The data on those old cards, no matter how important it may have been when the punch first hit the card, has now been rendered next to useless. So it was out with the old for those old friends…. into the trash.

But they needed some company, so alongside them in the trash I deposited some ancient listings and a couple of 8″ floppy disks. Yes, that’s right, EIGHT inch floppies. I haven’t seen a reader for those around in more than fifteen years. So, more data lost to the landfill! But is the obsolescence of data a new problem for us? The quick answer is NO!

Luckily, some very important data is being preserved by several leaders in their field. Decades before IBM build their keypunch machines a whole industry had grown up surrounding the punching of holes in paper. The holes I am referring to, of course, are those punched into player piano rolls for the purpose of encoding/recording music for later playback, before the advent of radio.

While we think little of holding in our hands a small electronic gizmo containing thousands of songs, it is instructive to consider what wonderful mirth and magic could be brought into a home back in the day via a strip of paper containing a pattern of holes. And just as we buy music of our favorite artists, there were specialized player rolls that were designed to reproduce the actual performance of an artist, just as it had originally been rendered! Astounding!

Those rolls are now rare in and of themselves, but perhaps ever rarer are the player pianos, reproducing pianos, band organs, etc., that can once again bring the music to life. Thank goodness for those intrepid inventors that I mentioned above. They have set themselves to the task of preserving as many of the old player rolls as they can find, building a sort of Open Library of piano roll recordings.

By utilizing modern electronics, they have created optical scanners which can recover even badly damaged rolls. Employing the modern paradigm for music encoding, they have converted the roll information into MIDI files, which can now be enjoyed by practically anyone with a computer.

Two of the leaders in the scanning and preservation of piano rolls are Terry Smythe and Warren Trachtman. Both of them have scanned thousands of rolls, and have been kind enough to make their archives available online. Terry Smythe’s website Player Piano Rebirth has a great discussion of his efforts, as well as downloads of over 3000 rolls! Over at Warren Trachtman’s site you’ll find another 4000 or more MIDI files, along with lots of valuable information and software for the construction of his roll scanner. Thanks to both of these gentlemen for their generosity and foresight in the preservation of these important pieces of history!

Recently, however, I stumbled upon the website of Robert Perry in New Zealand. Robert’s has a nice, clean site, with an interesting discussion of player pianos (pianolas) and player rolls. There is a nice collection of MIDI files available for download there as well. Robert has gone a step further, and you will enjoy reading about his acquisition of an old punch as he ventures into the creation of New Zealand’s first and only music roll company.

It’s wonderful that these old nuggets from the musical past are once again available to be enjoyed by so many! Maybe all things old are not new again, but in the case of piano rolls it sure seems to be the case! I hope you enjoy downloading and listening to some wonderful music, and remember to say Thanks to the kind souls that preserve and share the music with us all!

MirthMaker