Transcoding Nancarrow at the Dawn of the Age of MIDI The Preservation and Use of Conlon Nancarrow’s Player Piano Studies J im M u R p h y a n d T rim p in This article focuses on the process by which, in 1987, sound artist (including the recent Nancarrow Percussion Orchestra, which and inventor Trimpin converted composer Conlon Nancarrow’s makes use of modified versions of Nancarrow’s experimental Studies for Player Piano from their original hand-punched rolls into mechanical percussion apparatus). While other works that the MIDI format. In addition to presenting the technology utilized in ABSTRACT this conversion, the article focuses on the collaboration between Trimpin examine Trimpin’s artistic career provide excellent insights and Nancarrow, and on the significance of the act of porting works into his relationship with Nancarrow and their collaborations composed upon a vulnerable media format to a format that affords [2], this article aims to focus chiefly on Trimpin’s piano roll extension, analysis and preservation. The article concludes with an reader and the affordances it offers for new media explora- overview of a number of example uses of the transcoded Nancarrow tions of Nancarrow’s work. scores, including traditional performances and two extended Trimpin’s transcoding of Nancarrow’s works occurred in performances and installations. the 1980s, at a time when digital archivization of musical scores was in its early youth. This article provides technical The media upon which artworks are created and stored are details of Trimpin’s novel piano roll reader apparatus along- inherently transitory: Pigments fade, film degrades, paper side a discussion of why Nancarrow’s works were ideal can- yellows and grows brittle with age, and human conflict and didates for early porting into the digital domain. The article natural disasters threaten artworks. This article focuses on concludes with an examination of a number of exemplar ex- the transcoding, preservation and further applications of tensions of Nancarrow’s work that utilize the digitized scores one such potentially vulnerable body of works: that of com- to extend the original pieces’ spatial and timbral expression. poser Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997) by sound artist, instru- ment builder and composer Trimpin (1951–). Trimpin here Nancarrow and Trimpin provides previously unpublished insights into the technical Conlon Nancarrow is perhaps the most notable composer process and challenges he faced in transcoding Nancarrow’s for automatic instruments. He is today recognized as a com- scores. poser of “tremendous impact,” whose body of works for Whereas previous articles have focused on larger-scale player piano have been described by Gann as an “almost overviews of Trimpin’s career (exemplified by Sasha Leitman’s unparalleled fusion of visceral excitement and structural el- 2011 interview [1]), this article aims to focus on the technical egance” [3]. Although Nancarrow worked in an era during and practical details surrounding Trimpin’s transcoding of which the player piano and other clockwork instruments had Nancarrow’s scores; such details have yet to appear in pub- diminished in popularity (with the rise of the phonograph, lished form outside of disparate gallery pamphlets. Further, loudspeaker and other music reproduction technologies this article provides an up-to-date examination of the sub- [4]), Nancarrow identified the fine-grained control afforded sequent uses of Nancarrow’s transcribed scores, focusing on by interfacing with the music in a manner that was close to works for new media that utilize the MIDI transcriptions the hardware of the player piano: Much as a contemporary computer musician may gain more precision by expressing musical events in a low-level computer language such as C Jim Murphy (corresponding author, sonic artist, researcher), Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand School of Music, P.O. Box 600, Wellington 6140, or assembly language, Nancarrow’s scores represent a very New Zealand. Email: <[email protected]>. direct connection between the composer’s intentions and Trimpin (sound artist, inventor). Email: <[email protected]>. the resultant musical output. Indeed, Nancarrow directly See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/lmj/-/27> for supplemental files associated punched the musical events for his player piano studies into with this issue. rolls of paper to be read and interpreted by the player piano 32 LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 7, pp. 32–35, 2017 doi:10.1162/LMJ_a_01005 ©2017 ISAST Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_01005 by guest on 01 October 2021 itself. This low-abstraction-layer scoring allows listeners to of physical decay and damage: By the middle of the 1980s, hear directly Nancarrow’s compositional intentions without it was clear to Nancarrow that a system for preserving these the typical layer of musician-applied translation or mediation works was needed. applied to traditionally notated music (a concept explored During the second half of the 1970s, Trimpin focused on by automatic music scholar Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume in re- the development of tools that would allow for the transcod- lation to earlier automatophonic music storage media [5]). ing of punched player piano rolls from physical to electronic While this style of direct manipulation of temporal events media. Like those of other early innovators in mechatronic has become common among those using computer music sound sculpture, many of Trimpin’s instruments made use of composition approaches (such as sequencers, computer mu- electromagnetic actuators such as solenoids; these actuators sic programming languages and digital audio workstations), could be controlled by electronic circuits, allowing Trimpin Nancarrow was an early innovator long recognized as a sig- to create computer programs that served as scores for his nificant early forerunner in this field: As early as 1985 Curtis kinetic sound sculptures [8]. By developing devices capa- Roads cites Nancarrow’s works as significant predecessors of ble of reading punched-paper player piano rolls into elec- the rhythmic complexity possible within computer-mediated tronic memory, Trimpin could modify and play back player sonic arts [6]. Similarly, Thom Holmes describes Nancarrow’s piano media on new instruments of his design. One such music as “a conceptual precursor to the idea of programming instrument was Trimpin’s Piano Vorsetzer, an electronically and sequencing in electronic music” [7]. However, unlike a controlled piano player. In essence, Piano Vorsetzer was a programmatically entered electronic score, the laboriously precursor to the popular Yamaha Disklavier electronic player hand-punched piano rolls present a unique challenge: Due pianos, and Trimpin used it as a means both to play back to the relatively obscure device-specific nature of the me- transcoded existing scores and to create new and modified dia, the media was at risk of obsolescence as player pianos compositions for instruments. In this regard, Trimpin’s tech- decreased in abundance. Indeed, these original Studies that nological innovations allowed him to develop and expand were residing in Nancarrow’s Mexico City studio were at risk on the compositional innovations of automatic instrument composers such as Conlon Nancarrow and Ballet Mécanique composer George Antheil. With this foundation in the de- velopment of piano roll scanning and playback technology, Trimpin was, by the late 1980s, well poised to lead in the transcoding, preservation and extended application of Nan- carrow’s media. The Piano Roll ReadeR Like many of his sound sculptures and instruments, Trimpin’s piano roll reader (illustrated in Fig. 1) utilizes sur- plus com ponents and found electronics. The main source of components for the roll reader were salvaged surplus opti- cal punched tape readers; these readers were used to read data stored as punched holes on one-inch-wide tape into the memory of computers. Such readers were typically eight bits wide, consisting of a linear array of eight phototransistors positioned below the tape, with accompanying light sources positioned above the tape. As the tape was scrolled past the sensors, one byte at a time could be read into memory for storage and processing. In essence, this system is akin to the means by which player piano scores are read by a player piano, but with the traditional pianos’ pneumatic mecha- nisms being replaced by optoelectronics: The presence of a light brighter than a specified threshold indicates a logical high, much as the presence of air pressure in a player piano indicates that a note event should occur. In the late 1970s, such punched tape computer data storage systems had been largely replaced by denser magnetic storage systems (includ- ing magnetic tape), and Trimpin was able to obtain the op- tical punched tape readers inexpensively as surplus items. By 1980, given the wide availability of such optical punched tape scanners, Trimpin was able to fabricate an 88-bit-wide Fig. 1. The optoelectronic piano roll reader developed by Trimpin and used roll reader whose phototransistors were positioned to allow in the scanning of Conlon Nancarrow’s hand-punched piano rolls. (© Trimpin) player piano rolls to be scanned in real time. Upon scanning, Murphy and Trimpin, Transcoding Nancarrow at the Dawn of the Age of MIDI 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_01005 by guest on 01 October 2021 Fig. 2. Nancarrow Percussion Orchestra, consisting of an array of percussion devices originally developed by Conlon Nancarrow and made electromechanical by Trimpin. (© Trimpin) the data was stored on a cassette tape (replaced in 1984 by punched holes. During the many decades during which he a 3.5" floppy disk) for further modification and playback on had engaged in his hand-punching process, Nancarrow’s mechatronic instruments such as the early versions of the practice had been to cover each mistakenly punched note Piano Vorsetzer piano player. with a small piece of clear cellophane tape, preventing the pneumatic player piano tracker from identifying the incor- rect punch as a note event.