Keyboards are all around us, on our cell phones and laptops, mediating our writing, our correspondence, our digital expression, and accompanying our communication with audible punctuations of sound. Alphanumeric keys read digital input and produce sound in digital and mechanical output. The player piano, a mechanical musical instrument from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, utilized a similar keyboard interface. With its humming pneumatics and predetermined sequence of musical pitches, the instrument can teach us about our modern interactions with technologies that produce sound both within and outside of our immediate control. How we interact with both modern digital and historic instrument technologies reveals the importance of physical objects in our lives, and can even teach us about our modes of interaction as well as about ourselves as humans.
Notes:
Honors thesis in Music (AB)--Brown University (2016)
Haruta, Devanney,
"Games, ghosts, and glamour:
the player piano in domestic America, 1890-1930
"
(2016).
Music Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0WW7G2F