Introduction
By Bill Chapman
I haven't introduced myself here. I'm Bill Chapman, and member of both AMICA and MBSI. I was told about this area by Jim Heyworth, who was poking around with his new Pentium and located this area. I am just a little nutty over reproducing pianos, and am always twiddling the controls to make them play just a little better. I have a Weber Duo Art, and an upright AMPICO, et al.
My chief interest right now is turning toward interfacing the pianos with the computer, and hopefully reading rolls into the computer using the midi format. From there they could be edited to correct errors, particularly on the rolls that are re-cut copies. Another possibility would be to add expression to some
88 note rolls.
An earlier post mentioned a sonic roll reader concept (I cant scroll back to get the man's name) but that struck me and rather ingenious, since the paper passing over the holl in the tracker bar reader would seal it off from noise, and at particular frequencies, might be very effective. Earlier I had thought of using light readers, since there are very small light detectors that could fit in a tracker bar with the help of a little glass fiber.
However, I came across office paper scanners in a store recently, and it looks light they may do the job as well. They are made for the purpose of putting text or pictures into digial form. Some have optical character recognition programs, which suggests that the data from the scanned document may be manipulated. The last generation of paper scanners are very small an inexpensive. The trouble is, they are made for regular office paper and scan only 8.5 inches wide. I haven't found specs on them yet, but one suggested it would only scan 30" in length, to correspond with newspaper length. Perhaps the program could be modified to scan continuously. I'm checking now to see if any are made to scan older accounting ledgers, which were often very wide. The one that I am now exploring is Visioneer. I'll be writing to the company to suggest my use and see what they say. If I find others interested I'll post more info. My though s that tattered rolls could be transferred to disk, thus preserving some of the literature for players and reproducers.
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(Message sent Wed 20 Dec 1995, 03:43:07 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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