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Pneumatically Run Self-Playing Instruments

During a seemingly simpler time, there was a great amount of vibrant
music and a lot of great machines to play it on.  The technology was
lower and simpler giving these machines a certain charm. From their
humble beginnings to their maximum production of the 1920's and brief
revival, pneumatically operated music made its place in history and
brought much enjoyment to people everywhere.

By the turn of the century, in 1900, self-playing musical instruments
had been around for over 100 years already, but the most modern way of
producing them was with an air-operated system consisting of bellows
and pneumatics that ran off of a perforated paper roll.  One of the
most popular, early types of these instruments was called a pianola.
In 1897 Edwin Votey had created the first pianola and soon after made
more and had success in marketing them by 1898.  The pianola was a
machine one wheeled up to they keyboard of an ordinary piano and small
wooden "fingers" would press the piano's keys.  Votey soon realized,
though, that it would be a better idea to have one higher cost player
piano, a one-piece instrument, which would bring in more money to the
company selling it.  The player piano was built.

The way all player instruments with pneumatics work, is first they
get their power from hand pumping (with a revolving handle), an electric
motor to drive bellows, or by the most common method, foot pumping.  The
suction then can run the system.  After the power is supplied, a roll
begins to turn and tiny perforations in the paper go over a metal bar
with coordinating holes.  The single holes pass over the bar and let
air into the corresponding tube, thereby triggering a valve and
applying a vacuum pressure to a pneumatic (small bellows), closing it,
and performing the action to produce a sound out of whatever it's
applied to.  This explains how the instruments ran off vacuum.

The next greatest instruments after the player pianos were the
nickelodeons, also known as an orchestration, coin piano, or automatic
piano.  "For those who hated the pianola, things got worse.  As early
as 1898 a New York firm produced an electric piano that played when you
dropped in a nickel."  (Joseph Fox p.95)

The orchestration worked much the same as player pianos in basic
operation principals.  The orchestration was activated by a coin
mechanism, which turned on an electric motor when one put in one's
currency.  The bellows supplied the vacuum pressure by being driven
by an electric motor.  The  orchestrations were decorated more than
anything else, with often gaudy stained glass and electric lights.
The orchestrations would play a song off a roll of about eleven songs.
During the song, the orchestration (depending on what instruments it
had) would alternate between piano, small organ pipes, a xylophone,
drums, and many other instruments.  After this "performance" the
machine would be triggered to shut off by the roll.  The vacuum,
lights, and sound would then cease.  This is probably the most
enjoyed mechanical music instruments of it's kind because it was
played so much to provide music in bars and other public areas.

Now going into the homes of the more well off persons, or in clubs,
one may have found a reproducing piano.  The reproducing pianos came
around later than player pianos and orchestrations by showing up in
the late teens, through the early 1920s.  The reproducing pianos could
"reproduce" the original pianist's performance, made complete by its
ability to use different levels of volume or expression for the
notes played.  The entire concept was to mimic the real pianist's
playing be removing the element of constant volume produced by
regular player pianos.  The reproducing pianos had up to eight
levels of expression, or volume.  The reproducing piano could choose,
depending on the roll's perforations, how hard which key was used.
This was considered by most to be one of the most perfect reproductions
of live music ever.

Getting into even more complex instrumentation, there were self-playing
violins and banjos.  The violin had many different ways of automatically
being played, one of which had over 3,000 woven horsehair on a revolving
ring that produced the sound.  (Bowers, p.234)  These were contained
in a cabinet and usually in the homes of the wealthy or in clubs.
They were usually not coin-operated.  There are still more extravagant,
solo instruments, all run off rolls, which are mostly enclosed in
cabinets.  Next came the gigantic and expensive band organs.  Band
organs were primarily used in large concert or dance halls, fairgrounds,
and skating rinks.  They had the most complex and extravagant systems
ever invented.

Most band organs were so huge they weren't portable and sometimes a
building would be built around one instead of having a band organ
disassembled, then reassembled inside the building.  An example is
the Mammoth Military Band Organ, produced by Wurlitzer.  It had a
height of ten feet, six inches, a depth of four feet six inches.  It
had one hundred twenty violin pipes, twenty violoncellos, twenty nine
Bass violins, thirty clarinets, forty piccolos, fifty flutes, thirteen
brass trombones, twenty seven brass trumpets, and one hundred forty
eight accompaniment pipes  (Bowers, p. 78).  There were so many
instruments in both band organs and orchestrations, that there was no
possible way they could all be controlled separately off of a paper
roll. The main melody was played on the piano or a large set of pipes
and all the other instruments would play the same notes at the same
time.  For example, if the piano played the notes, A, B flat, and D,
the accompaniment instruments would play the same notes.  If they
didn't operate like this, there would have had to be a music roll
about four feet wide.  (Reblitz p. 24)

During the time when band organs were at their peak of production it
made some human musicians nervous.  Big concert bands wouldn't be
challenged, but sometimes small bands would lose their job at a skating
rink or bar. However, people didn't think live music would ever be
replaced by this new "canned music", and usually it wasn't.  As people
still dropped nickels into nickelodeons, radio and record technology
and quality were slowly improving.  When the stock market crashed on
October 30, 1929, virtually all pneumatic-type automatic music
production ceased.  With the economy put to a dead stop, there
simply was no more money for production or purchasing.  Then, during
the years between 1930-present, the old player machines were being
thrown out, ripped apart by ignorant people, beat on by children, or
suffering the elements of cold weather, or possibly even rain.  What
original pieces of mechanical music of this type that were left, were
generally not thought of as valuable, or didn't grab any public at
tension.

During the 1950's there was a slight production of  "keytop" players.
These player piano mechanisms reverted to the style of the pianola,
only they were smaller.  These modern machines sat on top of a regular
piano's keys and played the piano off a music roll.  The same company
that was a giant maker of player pianos in their heyday, Aeolian,
produced them.  These player piano machines ran off an electric vacuum,
but were not very popular.  The player piano was considered by most to
be dead, and the biggest maker of pneumatically run mechanical music
instruments, Wurlitzer, was now producing juke boxes.

Since the 1950's there had been a few other player pianos made new.
They were produced in the mid-seventies through the early eighties
after the public's interest was peaked in them because of the movie
"the Sting".  These were very poorly made replicas of the original
ones produced during the 1920's.  They had plastic valves along with
other poorly made parts, and they could only automatically play
seventy-four of the piano keys, instead of the full eighty-eight as
did the original player pianos.  Later, during the 1980's player
piano technology went high-tech as tape-run player pianos were
invented using electronic information instead of the conventional
perforated paper roll.  Since then there have been even more modern
systems, which could produce 127 levels of key velocity.  These most
modern players, made by Yamaha, use optical sensors, 3.5 inch
computer disks and solenoids. This shows that people are still
interested somewhat in "live" reproductions of actual piano music,
as opposed to the conventional compact disk or other recording.

The slimming, and already very slim, numbers of orchestrations and band
organs are usually obtained by well-educated enthusiasts or professional
restorers for complete and proper restoration.  Player pianos, on the
other hand, are usually still packed in a corner of a garage or basement
somewhere, but some are completely restored.  Their value, unlike
orchestrations and band organs, is relatively low.

Player pianos are the most common form of pneumatically run self-playing
instruments, but there were a lot of very extravagant other instruments
that were also pneumatically run which were very interesting and complex.

From their humble beginnings to their maximum production of the 1920's
and brief revival, pneumatically operated music made its place in
history and brought much enjoyment to people everywhere.

Damon Atchison