The world’s first software company and the world’s first player violin
from Around The Home (427 articles)
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Image Gallery ( 8 images )August 25, 2005 Prior to the advent of electronic mass media, the height of home entertainment technology was the player piano – a piano which played music encoded in binary format on perforated paper rolls. The company which became the dominant provider of both player pianos and the rolls they played is still in business today, and rightfully claims to be the world’s oldest software company. Interestingly, QRS (formerly Quality Roll Services) is now selling one of the most remarkable musical instruments in the world - the world’s first player violin, the QRS Virtuoso Violin. The QRS Virtuoso Violin is a real acoustic instrument. It produces sound by moving a bow across a string, just as a traditional violin does. Only in this case, bow and string are controlled by a computer chip rather than a human hand. Unlike the traditional violin, which has four strings, the Virtuoso Violin uses a single three-Inch steel "string-blade" to create sound. The bow, driven by motors and microchips in a box on which the violin is mounted, glides back and forth over this vibrating blade. The resulting sound rivals that of the traditional violin.
In these days of personal audio and video players, it’s hard to imagine that commercial radio has been with us for just 86 years, and that people born at the time of the first television commercial (1941) have not yet reached retirement age.
From the turn of the twentieth century to the coming of high-fidelity phonographs and electronic mass media, the height of home entertainment technology was the player piano – a piano which played music encoded on perforated paper rolls – the player piano was the first widely successful consumer device to encode its data in binary format.
Initially, as in the modern computer industry, there were many different methods for encoding and playing rolls before the industry finally settled into the logical best format and a standard roll size. The man who invented the standard roll size which encompassed all 88 notes was Melville Clark, whose company QRS was arguably the world’s first software company. The Apollo Player Piano of 1901 was the first to use the standard roll and the company still makes player piano software in this format to this day.
Punching rolls for the player piano required the creation of a master roll to serve as a pattern for the high-speed duplicating machines. For many years master rolls were created by hand-perforating from the original music score.
The main problem with music produced this way was the lack of artistic interpretation, resulting in a flat, lifeless sound. In 1912, Clark went one step further when he invented the Marking Piano which could record a “master roll” from live performances. The QRS Marking Piano was produced from 1912 to 1931, adding a human dimension to piano rolls.
With realistic performance possible on any player piano, sales took off and created the unmistakable sound of the music halls and the “Roaring Twenties”. Sales of player pianos peaked in the mid twenties, when over 10 million QRS rolls were sold and more player pianos were sold in America than normal pianos.
QRS today still has its factory in Buffalo and it still churns out the same quality piano rolls that gave it its name (Quality Roll Service) on machinery that is 105 years old and still operates flawlessly – they sure don’t make ‘em like that any more.
There are now over 7000 rolls (musical arrangements) in the catalogue and some of them are considered American national treasures, as the company still has the original recordings from the Marking Piano of Sergei Rachmaninov playing his own music and of George Gershwin himself playing “Rhapsody in Blue.” The master rolls have now been rejigged to play on the company’s current technology for its current range of player pianos.
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