About a year back I was contacted to see if it would be possible to
put together some information about the player piano for the "Musanim"
web site by Stephen Malinowki.  This is a modern-day take on how to
operate a music-making machine which stores the musical notes but
relies on its operator to determine how and when these notes are
sounded.  Stephen had noted that the musical box and then the player
piano were the precursors of the modern-day electronic devices and
software that he now uses for this, and wanted some more information
about the player piano.

This site has a number of short video clips showing the interaction
between performer and electronic playback devices, and as it happened
I was scheduled to perform a Pianola recital in south-west London, for
the Billy Mayerl Society, which was due to be videoed.  With the eager
collaboration of Mike Lorenzini, we decided to see if we could produce
a clip demonstrating the basic controls on offer.  Mike has a 65/88-note
Pianola push-up player operating a modern Seiler grand piano, and a
professional video installation as well, so it was too good an
opportunity to miss!

Thanks to Stephen, this video is now on the web available for all to
view.  Given that it was in large part an improvised first attempt,
it's not too bad.  You can reach it from its intended context at

  http://www.musanim.com/tapper/ConductorProgram.html#PlayerPiano

This is a very large page (several megabytes), and not exactly the
normal type of mechanical music page that we are used to.  It's
immensely thorough and rigorous about a subject that I must admit I'd
never thought about!  For those so inclined it's an interesting read.

If you prefer to go directly to the Pianola video clip, it's on the
free video-hosting site, Revver:  http://revver.com/video/16062/

The file is highly-compressed and is about 7 Mb.  It's in QuickTime
form, and can be played directly or downloaded for free.  (If you need
to install QuickTime first, be careful as it's one of those products
that takes over the computer if you let them; de-select all the options
except the ones needed to play QuickTime files.)

One question that the video doesn't answer: this Pianola has manual
tracking and the roll decided to start wandering, so I had to keep
fiddling with the tracking lever.  There was no time to try again,
as we had a concert to do!

Julian Dyer