In Digest 980506 Walt Carroll asks about the Kastonome rolls he has.

Kastonome was a patent theme accenting system included in some Kastner
& Co. player pianos in the UK starting in 1906 (when they also commenced
making 88n rolls) and ending in a whimper around 1926, though I believe
actual production ceased in 1924.

Technically Kastonome was of the same ingenuity as, and not at all
unlike, the Cable Solo Carola system.  In the Solo Carola, 88
additional very thin slots in the tracker bar just above (and slightly
to one side of) the note ports drove 44 pouch valves which released
pneumatics holding two hammers each at the "half-blow" position so that
they fell back to the "full-blow" position just in time for one of them
(usually) to be played by the corresponding note port.  Accented notes
were simply cut wider at the leading edge.

The Kastonome was an 80-note action with a trackerbar having 90 note
positions, whose outer five on each side had a vertical row of 8 ports
each, with the outside rows in positions 0 and 89, as for "Themodist"
-- something like this :-

     note:5    10   15   20   ...        75   80
  |  ooooo                                     ooooo  |
  |  ooooo                                     ooooo  |
  |  ooooo                                     ooooo  |<roll edge
  |  ooooo                                     ooooo  |
  |  ooooooooooooooooooooooooo...ooooooooooooooooooo  |
  |  ooooo                                     ooooo  |
  |  ooooo                                     ooooo  |
  |  ooooo                                     ooooo  |

It was quite a fat trackerbar ! No notes were played in positions 0
to 4 or 81 to 89, which were all used for theme ports.  These I have
shown 4 rows above and 3 below the note row level, but I think they
were actually placed half a row lower to make the layout symmetrical.

Two sets of playing suctions, theme and accompaniment, were established
by the Kastonomist (human player) with the aid of levers as for the
Themodist Pianola (though they differed in layout) and each of the 80
outside ports was connected to an additional pouch valve for one note
which switched its pneumatic from the "accompaniment" manifold in the
stack to the "theme" manifold.  Thus when a note was played simulta-
neously with its theme port being opened by a blip perforation on the
roll, it played that much louder.

I don't at this date remember exactly which theme ports related to
which notes (this can be established by careful examination of a roll
anyway), but they were arranged so that a false operation of theme --
by a "theme" perforation uncovering a wrong port on its way to or from
the right one -- could only occur with a very fast downward chromatic
sweep or arpeggio on the keyboard, a thing almost unknown in early
[20th century] music of any description.  Even if they had had to cut
a roll with such a passage "themed", Kastner had only to change the
speed of the roll to avoid this happening.

Kastonome scored over "Themodist" in being able to theme individual
notes in a simultaneously struck chord, but the stack had to have
double the usual number of pouches in it and is said to be almost
unrestorable.  The rolls turn up quite frequently in UK auctions and
could be recut on any Ampico perforator.  After the Great War the
system was licensed out and has been seen in Grotrian-Steinweg pianos.

Sadly, the only Kastonome I've seen recently was rebuilt with a plain
stack.  It would be good to have at least one preserved and playing.

Dan Wilson, London