MY FAVORITE KIND OF ROBOT OVERLORD.

If you don't want to read my nostalgic ramblings, skip on to the bottom where you can visit the link for the video.

I start rambling here. I never really talk about my career here, because it has little to do with game design. Well, I thought a new robot should be all the excuse I need to post on RMN. Meet Arpeggio, the piano superdroid. This is a cool article and video that touches on the technology of the past but doesn't really do it service. Of course, the focus really should be on the droid, but this droid is playing a musical performance from 1982, and the speaker suggests that the droid isn't playing a recording, but the actual performances. Of course, a piano technician will understand exactly what he's talking about. Most people, however won't.

Since 1895 automated players have been playing piano for those people that can't, ever since the invention of the Pianola. When the speaker talks about a piano playing the actual performances of Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, and Liberace, he's talking about a technology that existed before modern computer programming, and indeed, alongside vinyl and porcelain records. The reproducing piano built by companies such as Ampico, Pianola, Standard, and QRS (Formerly Quality Roll Service, now Quality Reproduction Service), needed rolls of paper in order to help these pianos reproduce. These rolls had regular holes cut into them at specific points to allow air from the reproduction system. As the old piano tech joke goes, player pianos don't suck, they blow.

When the article and video describes the performances of the Wayne Stahnke LX player system that this droid uses, it's these paper rolls that is supplying its archive. Really, these are the only archive there is. Cassette and records can't be used to duplicate these performances because those are static recordings that the system can't properly read. Such recordings aren't designed for reproduction, and don't have actual notations for every move the pianist made like the paper rolls do. Of course, it's all been transferred to digital file now, at least what survived into the digital era (we can thank QRS for preserving the bulk of that information).

There's history in this machine that goes far beyond the silicone and that's really what makes it a work of art. It isn't just one person's labor but the labor of thousands of people over more than a century. Of course, the real story is about Arpeggio, which uses the LX player system, which is really ideal for this type of machine, blowing other devices such as Mason & Hamlin's Pianodisc and QRS' PianoMation out of the water.

See the video here.