[HN Gopher] Who Hooked Up a Laptop to a 1930s Dance Hall Machine?
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Who Hooked Up a Laptop to a 1930s Dance Hall Machine?
Author : ChrisbyMe
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-12-04 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chrisbako.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chrisbako.com)
| Teever wrote:
| Great link!
|
| The Youtube Algorithm must be recommending similar videos to the
| both of us as I started getting the same kind of content a few
| weeks ago. I'm pretty partial to the Ace of Base "I saw the sign"
| cover that it's been recommending.[0]
|
| I did a little bit of digging and found this guys website:
| https://www.mechanicalmusicman.com/
|
| It would be neat to see a humanoid robot feed the tape into the
| machine and press play and then have the camera zoom out to a
| bunch of robots dancing together.
|
| Something about robots dancing to music that's produced by a
| mechanical MIDI machine feels right. Like a prelude to the
| impending replacement of humanity.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owAXxcx2uGQ
| ChrisbyMe wrote:
| I actually wrote the post so thank you! I hadn't found that
| guys website and will check it out.
|
| There's a really interesting history of automata at Disney too,
| someone made a very good video about it here if you haven't
| seen it!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjNca1L6CUk
| cluckindan wrote:
| I've been getting these recommendations too!
|
| One of the guy's videos shows a pile of piano rolls for the
| machine, and one is labeled "Never gonna give you up" :-)
| alnwlsn wrote:
| If you're looking at the "how" specifically:
|
| This would play MIDI files, not MP3s. Midi files are the digital
| version of that book with the punched holes, it's a sequence of
| note events over time.
|
| The physical book with holes forms a series of air valves. So
| what you do to convert it is attach a bunch of pneumatic solenoid
| valves instead. Then there is some interface board that lets you
| control a bunch of solenoids from a laptop. It's not really that
| complicated but you need one valve for each note, so you need a
| lot of them, and you have to physically plumb in each one to the
| organ.
|
| Have a look at Look Mum No Computer, he does this kind of stuff:
| https://www.lookmumnocomputer.com/projects#/joans-church-org...
| ChrisbyMe wrote:
| Very cool, this is exactly what I was looking for to answer the
| how question.
|
| These projects look awesome, if I'm ever in the UK I'll
| checkout their museum.
| frikk wrote:
| I've visited this museum and it was the highlight of my trip
| to the netherlands. I also wondered, for hours, about how
| cool it is to hook up modern hardware to these old systems.
| Can you imagine playing one live, similar to how an artist
| would play a synthesizer kit?
| Animats wrote:
| Oh, someone built a MIDI interface for an orchestron or band
| organ. Doing that for player pianos is not unusual. There are
| retrofit kits.[1]
|
| An orchestron is basically a player piano with extra instruments
| attached. Retrofitting for MIDI makes a lot of sense. Regular
| piano rolls are available for player pianos. Orchestrons were not
| standardized, so there's not much content available.
|
| In the SF bay area, the carousel at the Santa Cruz Beach
| Boardwalk has a 1894/1911 Ruth and Sohn band organ. Recent videos
| show that it's had a major overhaul and now runs on MIDI.[2] So
| they can modernize the playlist. It's amazing that thing is still
| running, next to the Pacific Ocean for well over a century.
|
| [1] https://thompsonpianos.co.uk/pages/self-playing-pianos
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQGtprXz0Ks
| ssl-3 wrote:
| This doesn't play MP3s.
|
| It just plays notes; those notes are sourced from MIDI files
| (though they could also be sourced from a MIDI keyboard or
| similar, so a human can play the machine live).
|
| The MIDI data stream, at it's most simple basis, is just a series
| of "note on" and "note off" commands. (MIDI can additionally do a
| lot more than this, but let's not dwell on that.)
|
| This concept actually compares particularly well with what a
| punched paper roll accomplishes: That, too, is just a series of
| "note on" and "note off" commands. For every possible note or
| drum or percussive (or automaton) thing the machine playing the
| paper roll can do, there's either a hole in the paper ("on") or
| there is not ("off").
|
| One system is digital and happens in numberland with circuits
| and/or code, while the other is pneumatic and uses valves and
| pipes and pumps to get the work done.
|
| But they're both binary systems, so it can be pretty straight-
| forward to convert between the two.
|
| Relatedly: A somewhat aloof chap in England has found himself
| with a fondness for pipe organs. He scored a whole church organ
| from a lady's house, converted it to MIDI with a rather grand
| assortment of custom PCBs and rewiring, and put it in his museum.
| (That organ was designed to use electricity and solenoid valves,
| and meant to be played live instead of with a paper roll, but
| it's the same game: Binary is binary.)
|
| The process is documented here:
| https://www.lookmumnocomputer.com/joans-church-organ
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(page generated 2025-12-04 23:01 UTC)