A Player piano is a piano capable of playing without a musician sitting at the keyboard.
It uses a pneumatic or electromechanical system that activates the hammers according to instructions contained in a perforated paper roll.
Player pianos became popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they made it possible to hear music at home without a pianist being physically present. In a way, they offered the possibility of reproducing a performance: the sound of an actual piano, available whenever someone wanted to hear it, from information physically stored on a roll of paper.
Over time, radio and phonographs increasingly took over that domestic function, and player pianos began to become collectible objects. The same happened to the rolls. Even so, rolls are still made today, using both traditional perforation methods and more recent systems involving software and MIDI technology.
But what interests me most is not so much the history of the instrument as the way it reads.
The roll is a continuous strip of paper wound around a tube.
Once installed in the piano, the paper moves across a metal bar called the tracker and is eventually wound onto another spool on the opposite side.
The tracker contains a row of small openings.
Each one functions as an air inlet for a pneumatic system hidden inside the instrument.
That air can be produced by foot pedals or by a motor operating a kind of bellows. The openings in the tracker are connected through tubes to small internal valves.
As the paper moves across the bar, it covers those openings.
Nothing happens.
But when a perforation in the paper aligns with one of the openings in the tracker, air can enter.
That small movement of air activates a valve.
The valve activates another part of the mechanism.
Eventually, a hammer strikes a string.
The string sounds.
The corresponding piano key also moves because it is connected to the same mechanism.
A hole in a piece of paper becomes sound.
I find that extraordinary.
The paper itself contains no sound.
There is no audible music inside the perforation.
A hole becomes a note only when it encounters a machine capable of reading it.
To us, the perforations can appear as points, lines, intervals, clusters, densities, or drawings.
To the piano, they are instructions.
The same mark exists in two ways at once.
As an image.
And as an operation.
The position of a perforation determines which note is activated.
Its length can determine how long that note remains active.
Relationships between different perforations create chords, rhythms, and sequences.
The speed at which the paper moves across the tracker also affects the speed of the performance and can be adjusted from the piano itself.
In this way, a visual structure moving across a paper surface can become a temporal sequence of sounds.
Historically, some methods for producing rolls began with the performance of a pianist. The musician played while a machine registered positions corresponding to those actions, which could later be turned into perforations.
An action became an inscription.
Later, that inscription could enter another piano and become action again.
That movement back and forth interests me.
A gesture can become code.
And code can become gesture again.
Something visually strange also happens when the piano begins to play.
The keys move.
But there are no hands on them.
The gestures we normally associate with a pianist's body continue to occur in front of us, except the body has disappeared.
You see the keys descend, hear the hammers striking the strings, and watch the instrument respond as if someone were playing it from a place you cannot see.
There is something inevitably ghostly about it.
Perhaps that is why I have always found it more interesting than simply listening to a recording.
The absence of the performer becomes visible.
When I decided to find a player piano for my own work, I did not want to use it only to reproduce existing rolls.
I wanted to make my own.
That completely changed my relationship with the instrument.
It was no longer only a question of what music the machine could play.
The question became:
What can this machine read?
The perforations I am making do not begin with predetermined musical compositions.
They come from drawing.
From bodily movement.
From rhythm.
From geometric structures.
From choreography.
And also from chance.
Those visual operations become holes in the paper and are then handed to the piano.
The machine does the only thing it knows how to do with them.
It interprets them as instructions.
I also wanted to change the system so that the paper would not have to end.
A conventional roll has a beginning and an end. Once it reaches the end, it must be rewound before it can begin again.
I wanted the paper to function as a continuous loop.
This required a slight modification of the mechanism and the construction of extensions that would allow the same surface to return repeatedly to the tracker.
The code does not end.
It returns.
The same pattern crosses the mechanism again and again.
But the paper does not disappear inside the machine.
It remains visible.
It rises.
Falls.
Curves.
Holds tension.
Moves through space.
It is no longer only a carrier of information.
It becomes an object as well.
It has weight.
Texture.
Scale.
Fragility.
Movement.
The loop becomes a very simple image of recursion: something passes through a system and returns to the point where it can be read again.
But what interests me most is that we never really hear the code by itself.
To become sound, it has to pass through many things.
First the paper.
Then the air.
The small openings.
The valves.
The tubes.
The bellows.
Wooden parts.
Metal.
Felt.
Hammers.
Strings.
The wooden body of the piano.
And finally, the air of the room.
Every one of these things participates in what we hear.
The mechanism makes noise.
There is friction.
Parts vibrate.
Air is pumped.
Keys move.
The wood amplifies some frequencies and absorbs others.
The strings make the entire body of the instrument resonate.
The sound acquires scale.
Direction.
Force.
Space.
Physical presence.
The code never arrives intact.
And that is not a problem.
That is precisely what interests me.
I could convert the same perforations into MIDI information and reproduce them as a digital file through a pair of speakers.
The notes might be equivalent.
But the experience would not be.
Standing in front of the player piano, you can see a machine reading.
You can follow the movement of the paper.
You can see the moment a perforation reaches the tracker.
You can watch a key respond.
You can hear the noise of the mechanism alongside the note.
You can feel the vibration of the piano's acoustic body in the room.
All of that changes the information.
But it also changes the listener.
We do not perceive a note produced by a small speaker in the same way as a string struck inside a large wooden body.
The listener's body becomes part of the system as well.
Distance.
Position.
Volume.
The reverberation of the room.
What we see while we listen.
Our memories of pianos.
Even the slightly strange sensation of watching the keys move by themselves.
All of it enters the experience.
This is why I began thinking about the player piano not only as a musical instrument, but as a reading device.
It reads a code.
But in reading it, it also transforms it.
The materiality of the machine, the roughness of the mechanical translation, the handmade construction of the roll, its imperfections, instrumental noise, and the cultural associations of the object all appear in what we eventually perceive.
None of those things are contained in the perforations themselves.
They appear only when the information passes through the device.
And when I say device, I am not thinking only about the machine.
I am also thinking about the paper.
The room.
The objects around it.
The acoustic space.
And the person standing there listening.
The hole in the paper may seem very simple.
But in order to become sound, it has to pass through an entire world.
And when we finally hear it, we are no longer hearing only the hole.
We are also hearing everything it had to pass through.
2026.
Relateded Work: Vertical Loom