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Definition: player piano from The Columbia Encyclopedia

an upright piano incorporating a mechanical system that automatically plays the encoded contents of a paper strip. This strip, perforated with holes whose position and length determine pitch and duration, is drawn over a pneumatic device that shoots streams of air through the holes. The air is guided through a tube to the corresponding hammer, which strikes the string. The pieces used in player pianos often reproduced performances by famous pianists. Although popular during the late 19th and early 20th cent., the player piano was eclipsed by phonographs and radios.


player piano

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Mechanical piano designed to reproduce key actions recorded on a perforated paper roll. The hammers are made to touch the strings not by action of the hand on the keyboard but by air pressure. This is regulated by a roll of perforated paper running over a series of slits corresponding with the musical scale and releasing the air only where the holes momentarily pass over the slits. The mechanism is set in motion by pedals like those of a harmonium. Dynamics were at first controlled by the action of the players' hands, more or less roughly according to their skill, but they were later reproduced mechanically exactly as played by the recording artist. Debussy, Mahler, Grainger, and Stravinsky recorded their own works on piano roll. The concert Duo-Art reproducing piano encoded such detailed information that audiences were unable to distinguish a live performance from a reproduced performance. However, without a player, the player piano became simply a playback device for recordings, in…
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Full text Article pianola

From The New Penguin Dictionary of Music
Mechanical piano in which the action responds not to the player's fingers but to a recording in the form of a roll of paper, with perforations representing notes and durations. Several instruments of this kind were developed in the last two decades of the 19th century, including what the US organ…
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Full text Article player piano

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Steinway-Welte player piano, 1910; in the British...
Piano that mechanically plays music encoded as perforations on a paper roll. An early version, patented in 1897 by the American engineer E.S. Votey, was a cabinet placed in front of an ordinary piano, with wooden “fingers” projecting over the keyboard. A paper roll with perforations corresponding to…
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Full text Article Player piano

From The Harvard Dictionary of Music
An automatic instrument consisting of a piano and a mechanical device that plays it. In some early examples, from the late 19th century, a separate device with fingerlike levers was placed in front of a piano. More characteristic of the player piano's period of greatest popularity in the 1920s were…
| 273 words
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Full text Article player piano

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Mechanical piano designed to reproduce key actions recorded on a perforated paper roll. The hammers are made to touch the strings not by action of the hand on the keyboard but by air pressure. This is regulated by a roll of perforated paper running over a series of slits corresponding with the…
| 273 words
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Full text Article player piano

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
| 92 words
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Full text Article player piano

From The Macquarie Dictionary
| 14 words
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Full text Article player piano

From Collins English Dictionary
| 8 words
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Full text Article player piano

From The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language
| 32 words
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Full text Article player piano

From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate(R) Dictionary
| 14 words

Full text Article player piano

From The New Penguin Dictionary of Music
| 4 words
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