Advances in technology have been used to repeatedly reinvent the player piano since the first pneumatic devices started reading holes punched in paper rolls 200 years ago. Today, any decent piano store has several digitally controlled player-enhanced pianos in its lineup.
While dancing keys on automated pianos are still a curiosity, the pianos are by no means a novelty.But when a laptop computer started playing the violin at a recent trade show, the audience went nuts wanting a closer look.
Representatives of QRS Music Inc., based in Buffalo, N.Y., and their violin were an entertaining side show to a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas recently.
They hadn't planned on joining the hundreds of exhibits on the show floor after the speech -- their Virtuoso Violin just emerging from the development lab -- but the clamor led show organizers to clear space for the company near a key entrance to the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The QRS Virtuoso Violin was an instant hit. "We hadn't planned on exhibiting. I only brought about a hundred business cards, and they were gone almost immediately," said marketing director Tom Dolan as he scrawled his name and phone number on scraps of paper for people who wanted more information. Behind him stood the Virtuoso Violin, poised on a nondescript ebony stand, playing a duet with a player-enhanced grand piano that was tethered to the same laptop.
Gawkers were so intent a few came dangerously close to getting their eye poked out by the violin's bow as a mechanized device drew it back and forth across the instrument.
According to the company, musician Fred Paroutaud of Paroutaud Music Labs in Los Angeles had been unsuccessful in his attempts to obtain a good violin sound from electronically sampled and synthesized sounds. So he developed the technology at the core of the Virtuoso Violin to make a real violin take instructions from a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) computer file.
The most unusual feature of the violin is a thin metal reed QRS calls a "string blade" that sits atop the bridge and replaces the violin's two center strings. The two outer strings remain to help hold the bridge in place.
A servo motor controls the bow angle, and a motor controls the bow's speed and direction as the bow is drawn across the string blade. The blade is surrounded by a strong electromagnetic force and vibrates as the bow is drawn across it. A waveform generator alters the blade's oscillation frequency, which changes the pitch.
Volume is controlled by increasing or decreasing the amplitude of the wave driving the string blade and by changing bow speed.
The violin's traditional acoustic qualities amplify the vibration and preserve the tone the instrument would have with its regular strings attached.
How does it sound? "We started with a cheap, $100 violin. So it isn't going to sound any better than that," Dolan said. Still, the precision of the music being played suggests that the $100 violin has had a lot of lessons -- $10,400 worth of lessons, to be precise, figuring the Virtuoso Violin's expected retail price of $10,500.
QRS's Story and Clark grand pianos sell for $10,900, putting the price of a duet repertoire at $21,400.
The sound quality, in fact, was very pleasing. The only thing that could be described as clunky about the violin's play results from an abruptness as the servo motor lifts the bow on and off the blade. Tuning and vibrato, because of the precision of the waveform generator, are always perfect.
Dolan said the company plans to take special orders from customers who want a particular make or model of violin used. "Nobody has asked us to cannibalize a Stradivarius yet," he said.
QRS began in 1900 as QRS Music Rolls Inc., making rolls for the player pianos of the day. QRS still sells a wide variety of nickelodeons and player pianos in both the MIDI and roll-mechanism configurations.
Dolan hesitated when asked if the company has other instruments in development until he heard the exhibitor with him detailing another project. "Uh, I guess I can tell you we're working on a guitar," he said.
The QRS Virtuoso Violin was a hit at a recent electronics show in Las Vegas.