The world’s first software company and the world’s first player violin

The company prides itself in having made the world’s best player pianos for over 105 years and during the course of a dinner in the United States a few years ago the management got talking about the directions its technology was taking and came up with a challenge for the long-time collaborators Fred Paroutaud and Dr. Thomas Paine of Paroutaud Music Laboratories – to make a self-playing violin.

Paroutaud has written and orchestrated for such productions as Murder, She Wrote, Amazing Stories, Phantom of the Opera and The Gambler II. Tom Paine was administrator of NASA during the Apollo flights to the moon, vice president of General Electric and president of Northrop Corporation.

"We began working on the Virtuoso Violin in 1989, looking at how a violin string vibrates, and how a performer controls that vibration," Paroutaud recalls. "A violin plays different notes when the performer changes the length of a string by depressing his or her fingers on it, causing the string to vibrate at different rates. We didn't want to duplicate this action with solenoid fingers-they would be too cumbersome in an instrument as small as a violin. Instead, we developed an entirely new technology. As a result, the Violin is capable of an array of nuances, including glissandos and vibratos, that solenoids are not well-suited for."

Rather than trying to change string length, Paroutaud and Paine decided to electromagnetically drive a single string (or "string-blade") at different frequencies. As the frequencies changed, so did the resulting pitch played by the violin. This eliminated the need to change the string's length, resulting in a vastly simplified mechanism.

"People are just amazed the first time they see a violin 'playing itself,' making beautiful acoustic music without a person moving the bow across the string," said Dick Dolan, president of QRS Music. "Watching its bow glide across its 'strings' as if guided by an invisible hand is likely to be one of the more memorable images you'll ever see."

The resultant instrument is now called the Virtuoso Violin. This acoustic instrument produces sound by moving a bow across a violin, just as a traditional instrument does, but human hands never touch either the bow or instrument; instead both are controlled completely by a built-in micro-controller circuit. QRS has prepared this brief comparison of how the Virtuoso Violin compares to a real violin.

The unique, patented technology and rich, acoustic sound of the Virtuoso Violin make it the perfect complement to QRS's Pianomation system, a computer-controlled "self-playing" piano featured at Hollywood's famed Magic Castle. The Virtuoso Violin, a finely crafted instrument capable of achieving the full range of notes produced by an acoustical violin, can play independently or can perform duets with the piano.

The QRS Pianomation system can turn any piano into a reproducing player piano. A patented hardware and software process can store and transport Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) information as an analog signal. This process gives QRS the ability to store, and wirelessly transmit, MIDI performance data in an analog format from a controller (CD, video, cassette, DAT or Minidisc) to the receiver on the piano.

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