I've been thinking about "compression" of musical data.  If you
are familiar with the Autophone organettes (the most popular being
a simplistic instrument with hand-operated bellows) you've perhaps
seen their tune strips.  What is unique is that they are driven at
two speeds, depending upon the immediate coding of the strip.

Horton's initial 1877 patent (US Patent 196,529) depicted the ratchet
drive mechanism which was controlled by one set of holes in the music
strip, "for the purpose of executing the quick notes, and to economize
space in the music sheet."  By this intermittent drive and therefore
the "condensation" of the music strip, the company could effectively
decrease the cost of producing music.

But of course no one was set up to produce such music, so when H.B.
Horton attempted to interest investors, he "was then unsuccessful,
owing to the fact that special music, differing materially from that
used in other automatic musical instruments, was required, and there
was a general incredulity as to his ability to construct a machine that
would cut it." But inventiveness triumphed, and Horton was quick to
design and build machinery to press such music.

So I wondered whether there were other instruments which also
compressed musical data in some manner.  I'm of course familiar with
the use of stops to store data for more than one rank in a single line.
And there's of course a binary encoding for more than one volume level.
But are there other instruments which made use of compression schemes
for the music itself?  Surely the Autophone Co. wasn't the only one
who wished to reduce their storage size.  Who else compressed data?
And how?

(As a computer programmer I work with compression schemes all the time
-- not just overall compression of a file, but a plethora of designs
for storing even small pieces of data.  Last week I was working with
the storage format of a floating point number, a basic concept.  But
it's fascinating to me that in order to save just one data bit, they
assume an initial one for the mantissa, and to save another single bit
they avoid signed exponents by using an offset.  So ask me how our
company stores a 10-character string of upper and lower case characters
and digits and spaces as one floating point number!)

Thanks,
Todd Augsburger, Ohio - Roller Organs
http://www.rollerorgans.com/

 [ The binary scheme of the Duo-Art is an example of data encoding.
 [ Modern data compression schemes, such as Winzip and Stuffit,
 [ look for repeating patterns in the data and encode the patterns.
 [ The familiar Westminster chimes song played by many clocks has
 [ many repetitions of the same melody sections and so could be
 [ compressed to save data storage space on the cams or pinned
 [ cylinder, but the mechanism to reproduce (decompress) the data
 [ might be quite complex.  -- Robbie