I found the link because I was curious if player piano rolls could record live playing. Yes.
What sparked my curiosity is 21 Pianomation Floppy disks that arrived yesterday with a recently eBay’d Yamaha Midi Data Filer 3. Pianomation is a system QRS corporation fits on grand pianos to allow them to operate as player pianos.
QRS is still in business and started out making piano rolls around 1900 and quickly invented a machine to record pianists live performances. https://www.qrsmusic.com/
Anyway, the floppy disks are approximately album length collections of Midi files and quite a few of the Midi files say who played the piano. Given when some of the players died, the Midi is almost certainly converted from piano rolls.
I’ve been playing them back through a Yamaha General Midi era piano voice…and $10,000 hands on a two dollar guitar surely does sound better than two dollar hands on a $10,000 guitar.
But Liberace might be spinning in his grave…I ran his data into the Honky Tonk Piano.
Fun trivia about piano rolls and copyright which us software nerds might find interesting:
"White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company, 209 U.S. 1 (1908), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that manufacturers of music rolls for player pianos did not have to pay royalties to the composers."
"The main issue was whether or not something had to be directly perceptible (meaning intelligible to an ordinary human being) for it to be a "copy."
> “This case was subsequently eclipsed by Congress's intervention in the form of an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909, introducing a compulsory license for the manufacture and distribution of such "mechanical" embodiments of musical works.”
A CD and MP3s consist of recorded performances. A player piano roll contains the instructions for a performance, basically a transcription of sheet music, or a recording of someone performing a work. (Didn't read court findings for scope.)
Works (sheet music and lyrics) and recordings (committing it to media or storage) and performances can be distinctly copyrighted and separately licensed. But a CD track represents all 3 of those put together through “sweat of the brow”, usually by multiple parties.
Not strictly true. Player piano rolls were not made by mechanical transciption; a human actually played the music into a recording device (at least towards the end of the era). Because of this, we have a "recording" of Scott Joplin playing one of his rags. Dynamics are not preserved, but actual timing is.
Any idea how they generate these? It seems like you could unroll a piano roll, scan it optically, and generate MIDI from it, but I'm having trouble searching because "MIDI" + "piano roll" leads only to piano rolls in digital audio workstations.
I’ve been paying more attention to Náhuatl after reading “The Aztecs: A Very Short Introduction” [0] and seeing the names of my great uncles and great aunts in there (e.g. Xochitl, Nezahualcoyotl) which opened a mystery of sorts. My grandmother and her older brother had very classically Mexican names and the four younger siblings had Náhuatl names, but why? My great aunts didn’t know but I suspect that the answer is related to the “Indigenismo” movement in Mexico [1], which may also be behind the linguistic renaissance that this article describes.
My personal ties to this history aside, it’s fascinating to see how many Náhuatl words made it into Mexican Spanish and into English and beyond! [2]
which has a very interesting discussion of how the native usage of these languages was affected by the Catholic Church and the children/descendants of immigrants.
Ages ago, there was an article on how earthen homes were traditional in many parts of South America (_not_ Pueblo) and the advantages of them --- folks lived quite well in this part of the world for millennia before Columbus and those who followed him --- and it is due to their innovations that Malthus' math was incorrect, which we should all recall the next time we have a potato chip, or eat anything made of maize.
I'm sure you know, but even seeing the distinction between "Classically Mexican names" and "Náhuatl names" strikes me as weird, since the place we get the word "Mexico" is the "Mexica" tribe that were the dominant of the three Nahua tribes that constituted the Aztec Empire on colonization.
And remember that this is possible because the Spanish did respect the old culture. Actually it was the mexicans after their independence that tried to remove it.
The hell, respect the old culture? They couldn't completely stamp it out, more like it, but there was no respect there. Some native culture survived despite the Spaniards' attempts, but there was no respect whatsoever. The closest thing to "respect" was stuff like Bartomolé de las Casas thinking that it was cruel to enslave the natives because they weren't strong enough, so it would be better to bring Africans to America and enslave them instead (which he later also regretted, but the damage was done).
I don't even know where could you have possibly gotten the idea that the Spaniards were respectful. Were you told the Leyenda Rosa in school?
First, understand that Mexicans are a diverse group of people, some with very “Spanish” lineages. Second, the Spanish intentionally erased very large portions of indigenous culture. The Spanish colonizers absolutely did not “respect” the old culture except for very specific and unique instances. I’m not sure how you can possibly say as much? It’s essentially genocide erasure.
Anyways, the Mexican government currently communicates in a variety of indigenous languages on official forms and so they’re certainly trying to reinvigorate those traditions now.
Could you explain where you got the idea that the Spanish as a whole respected indigenous culture in mesoamerica ?
Only on this website could you have someone confidently state that the genocidal colonizers of Spain “respected the culture.” This is so wrong and offensive it could be part of Grok’s system prompt.
Please note that the 14th Amendment does not “discuss” who is a citizen, a better word would be “establishes” or “determines” - the “discussion” happened during the drafting and ratification processes and all of those records are available for you to read. Post ratification, the court system uses those discussions as part of their decisions on issues related to clarification of questions that arose after ratification. Those court decisions are also available for you to read.
Word Lens, by Quest Visual
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_Visual