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
ABSTRACT
and inventor Trimpin converted composer Conlon Nancarrow’s
Studies for Player Piano from their original hand-punched rolls into
the MIDI format. In addition to presenting the technology utilized in
this conversion, the article focuses on the collaboration between Trimpin
and Nancarrow, and on the significance of the act of porting works
composed upon a vulnerable media format to a format that affords
extension, analysis and preservation. The article concludes with an
overview of a number of example uses of the transcoded Nancarrow
scores, including traditional performances and two extended
performances and installations.
The media upon which artworks are created and stored are
inherently transitory: Pigments fade, film degrades, paper
yellows and grows brittle with age, and human conflict and
natural disasters threaten artworks. This article focuses on
the transcoding, preservation and further applications of
one such potentially vulnerable body of works: that of com-
poser Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997) by sound artist, instru-
ment builder and composer Trimpin (1951–). Trimpin here
provides previously unpublished insights into the technical
process and challenges he faced in transcoding Nancarrow’s
scores.
Whereas previous articles have focused on larger-scale
overviews of Trimpin’s career (exemplified by Sasha Leitman’s
2011 interview [1]), this article aims to focus on the technical
and practical details surrounding Trimpin’s transcoding of
Nancarrow’s scores; such details have yet to appear in pub-
lished form outside of disparate gallery pamphlets. Further,
this article provides an up-to-date examination of the sub-
sequent uses of Nancarrow’s transcribed scores, focusing on
works for new media that utilize the MIDI transcriptions
Jim Murphy (corresponding author, sonic artist, researcher), Victoria University
of Wellington, New Zealand School of Music, P.O. Box 600, Wellington 6140,
New Zealand. Email: <jim.murphy@vuw.ac.nz>.
Trimpin (sound artist, inventor). Email: <trimpin@gmail.com>.
See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/lmj/-/27> for supplemental files associated
with this issue.
32 LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 7, pp. 32–35, 2017 doi:10.1162/LM J_a_01005  ©2017 ISAST
(including the recent Nancarrow Percussion Orchestra, which
makes use of modified versions of Nancarrow’s experimental
mechanical percussion apparatus). While other works that
examine Trimpin’s artistic career provide excellent insights
into his relationship with Nancarrow and their collaborations
[2], this article aims to focus chiefly on Trimpin’s piano roll
reader and the affordances it offers for new media explora-
tions of Nancarrow’s work.
Trimpin’s transcoding of Nancarrow’s works occurred in
the 1980s, at a time when digital archivization of musical
scores was in its early youth. This article provides technical
details of Trimpin’s novel piano roll reader apparatus along-
side a discussion of why Nancarrow’s works were ideal can-
didates for early porting into the digital domain. The article
concludes with an examination of a number of exemplar ex-
tensions of Nancarrow’s work that utilize the digitized scores
to extend the original pieces’ spatial and timbral expression.
Nancarrow and Trimpin
Conlon Nancarrow is perhaps the most notable composer
for automatic instruments. He is today recognized as a com-
poser of “tremendous impact,” whose body of works for
player piano have been described by Gann as an “almost
unparalleled fusion of visceral excitement and structural el-
egance” [3]. Although Nancarrow worked in an era during
which the player piano and other clockwork instruments had
diminished in popularity (with the rise of the phonograph,
loudspeaker and other music reproduction technologies
[4]), Nancarrow identified the fine-grained control afforded
by interfacing with the music in a manner that was close to
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
or assembly language, Nancarrow’s scores represent a very
direct connection between the composer’s intentions and
the resultant musical output. Indeed, Nancarrow directly
punched the musical events for his player piano studies into
rolls of paper to be read and interpreted by the player piano
 itself. This low-abstraction-layer scoring allows listeners to
hear directly Nancarrow’s compositional intentions without
the typical layer of musician-applied translation or mediation
applied to traditionally notated music (a concept explored
by automatic music scholar Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume in re-
lation to earlier automatophonic music storage media [5]).
While this style of direct manipulation of temporal events
has become common among those using computer music
composition approaches (such as sequencers, computer mu-
sic programming languages and digital audio workstations),
Nancarrow was an early innovator long recognized as a sig-
nificant early forerunner in this field: As early as 1985 Curtis
Roads cites Nancarrow’s works as significant predecessors of
the rhythmic complexity possible within computer-mediated
sonic arts [6]. Similarly, Thom Holmes describes Nancarrow’s
music as “a conceptual precursor to the idea of programming
and sequencing in electronic music” [7]. However, unlike a
programmatically entered electronic score, the laboriously
hand-punched piano rolls present a unique challenge: Due
to the relatively obscure device-specific nature of the me-
dia, the media was at risk of obsolescence as player pianos
decreased in abundance. Indeed, these original Studies that
were residing in Nancarrow’s Mexico City studio were at risk
Fig. 1.  The optoelectronic piano roll reader developed by Trimpin and used
in the scanning of Conlon Nancarrow’s hand-punched piano rolls. (© Trimpin)
Murphy and Trimpin, Transcoding Nancarrow at the Dawn of the Age of MIDI 33
of physical decay and damage: By the middle of the 1980s,
it was clear to Nancarrow that a system for preserving these
works was needed.
During the second half of the 1970s, Trimpin focused on
the development of tools that would allow for the transcod-
ing of punched player piano rolls from physical to electronic
media. Like those of other early innovators in mechatronic
sound sculpture, many of Trimpin’s instruments made use of
electromagnetic actuators such as solenoids; these actuators
could be controlled by electronic circuits, allowing Trimpin
to create computer programs that served as scores for his
kinetic sound sculptures [8]. By developing devices capa-
ble of reading punched-paper player piano rolls into elec-
tronic memory, Trimpin could modify and play back player
piano media on new instruments of his design. One such
instrument was Trimpin’s Piano Vorsetzer, an electronically
controlled piano player. In essence, Piano Vorsetzer was a
precursor to the popular Yamaha Disklavier electronic player
pianos, and Trimpin used it as a means both to play back
transcoded existing scores and to create new and modified
compositions for instruments. In this regard, Trimpin’s tech-
nological innovations allowed him to develop and expand
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 com­ponents 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
roll reader whose phototransistors were positioned to allow
player piano rolls to be scanned in real time. Upon scanning,
 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
a 3.5" floppy disk) for further modification and playback on
mechatronic instruments such as the early versions of the
Piano Vorsetzer piano player.
Transcoding to MIDI
By 1987, Trimpin had expanded his piano roll reader from 88
to 96 notes, allowing for the reading of an additional eight
accent notes on a piano roll. Further, Trimpin had ported his
roll reader hardware to output notes in the then-new Musical
Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) format, allowing note
pitch, duration and dynamic data to be encoded in a com-
pact and portable format. It was at this stage that Trimpin
approached Conlon Nancarrow, offering to travel to Nan-
carrow’s Mexico City studio in order to transcode the exist-
ing Studies into MIDI format. Nancarrow, far from rejecting
the move toward the electronic composition of player piano
studies, embraced the opportunity for both the archiving and
future use and extension of his work.
In order to test the quality of the transcoded Studies,
Trimpin brought his Piano Vorsetzer to Nancarrow’s studio.
He positioned the Piano Vorsetzer above the keys of Nancar-
row’s piano, allowing the pieces to be tested for accuracy as
they were transcoded. After copying a number of example
pieces, he played back the resultant MIDI files through the
solenoid-equipped MIDI-compatible Piano Vorsetzer. Im-
mediately, Nancarrow identified extraneous notes playing
alongside the correct ones. Assuming that the problem lay
within the electronics of the piano roll reader, Trimpin tested
the reader by feeding in a known-to-work 88-note test roll;
the test roll scanned and played back correctly. Curious,
Nancarrow and Trimpin examined the rolls that had been
hand-punched by Nancarrow. Trimpin noticed the pres-
ence of small pieces of clear cellophane tape covering some
34 Murphy and Trimpin, Transcoding Nancarrow at the Dawn of the Age of MIDI
punched holes. During the many decades during which he
had engaged in his hand-punching process, Nancarrow’s
practice had been to cover each mistakenly punched note
with a small piece of clear cellophane tape, preventing the
pneumatic player piano tracker from identifying the incor-
rect punch as a note event. While the cellophane tape pre-
vented the transmission of the pneumatic energy, it did not
prevent Trimpin’s optoelectronically based piano roll reader
from transmitting light through the clear tape and picking
up the signal on its array of phototransistors. Due to the
large body of work featuring the cellophane tape-based cor-
rections, the manual correction of the errors after scanning
was deemed by Trimpin to be restrictively time consuming,
especially considering the event-dense nature of many of
Nancarrow’s Studies.
To address the false positive events produced by the op-
toelectronics’ interactions with the cellophane tape repairs,
Trimpin opted to produce a second version of his piano roll
reader. This roll reader forewent the phototransduction-
based approach, instead utilizing a pneumatic transduction
approach intended to more closely match the functioning
of a traditional player piano’s roll-reading mechanism. This
second version of the piano roll reader consisted of a vacuum
cleaner–based suction source and a linear array of pressure
switches. In the absence of a punched hole, the pressure pro-
duced by the vacuum cleaner would be blocked by the paper
as well as by any cellophane tape–based correction. In the
presence of a punched hole, however, the air pressure at the
pressure switch would change and would be registered as a
MIDI event. With this problem solved, Trimpin was able to
commence the process of transcoding all of Conlon Nancar-
row’s hand-punched piano rolls into the MIDI format. Once
rendered as electronically stored media, these works were
ready for long-term preservation and extension, as discussed
in the following section.
 Preservation, Playback and Extension
The act of transcoding Nancarrow’s pieces for player piano
into the MIDI format has created three key avenues through
which Nancarrow’s work may be explored: the porting of
the pieces to a format that allows for simplified analysis and
distribution, the playback of the pieces in a traditional man-
ner and the extension of the pieces to new instruments, ar-
rangements and presentation contexts. This article concludes
by briefly examining each of these avenues.
While MIDI is a relatively low-resolution format by con-
temporary standards, its temporal and pitch resolution is
more than sufficient to serve as a digital storage format for
player piano compositions. The Nancarrow compositions
transcoded by Trimpin may therefore now be archived, cop-
ied and shared. Of particular interest from an archival and
scholarly perspective is the as-yet-unrealized potential to use
the Nancarrow MIDI scores as the data set for analysis tech-
niques based on the advances made within the field of music
information retrieval. With the scores in an electronic for-
mat, there exists much potential for future work to be done
utilizing semi-automated techniques to analyze and study the
transcoded Nancarrow compositions.
While the possibility of detailed music information re-
trieval–based examination of the Nancarrow MIDI transcrip-
tions represents an avenue for future study, Trimpin has made
use of the MIDI files both in traditional playback contexts in
collaboration with Nancarrow and in new interpretations of
the MIDI files realized through novel instruments. In 1989,
Trimpin and Nancarrow first exhibited the transcoded Studies
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. These studies were played
back as they were composed: utilizing mechanically actuated
pianos. At the same time, Trimpin developed an interpreta-
tion of the Studies on Klompen, an array of MIDI-controlled
References and Notes
  1 Sasha Leitman, “Trimpin: An Interview,” Computer Music Journal
35, No. 4, 12–27 (2011).
  2 See, for example, preeminent Nancarrow scholar Kyle Gann’s chap-
ter (“Trimpin, Nancarrow, and the Transfer of Memory”) in Anne
­Focke, ed., Trimpin: Contraptions for Art and Sound (Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 2011).
  3 Kyle Gann, “Nancarrow, Conlon,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford
Music Online (Oxford Univ. Press): <www.oxfordmusiconline.com/
subscriber/article/grove/music/19552> (accessed 11 October 2016).
  4 These other music reproduction technologies are detailed in Focke
[2].
  5 Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume, “Ornamentation in Mechanical Music,”
Early Music 11, No. 2, 185–193 (1983).
  6 Curtis Roads, ed., Composers and the Computer (San Francisco: W.
Kaufman, 1985).
  7 Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 2nd Ed. (New
York: Routledge, 2002). p. 235.
  8 Trimpin’s early automated installations are discussed in more detail
in Steve Peters’ chapter “Archival Investigations” in Focke [2].
Murphy and Trimpin, Transcoding Nancarrow at the Dawn of the Age of MIDI 35
wooden shoes struck with electromechanical actuators [9];
this interpretation of the Nancarrow studies premiered at the
Sheridan Opera House in 1989. Similarly, in 1997 Trimpin
debuted ConlonInPurple, a work featuring a hanging array of
five octaves worth of tuned bars and accompanying solenoid-
based percussion mechanisms. ConlonInPurple extends Nan-
carrow’s piece into the spatial domain, “exploding” the pitched
and rhythmic elements into a room-filling sound sculpture
through which gallery visitors may walk [10].
More recently, Trimpin realized the Nancarrow Percussion
Orchestra. This 2012 showing at the Berkeley Art Museum
and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California,
Berkeley, celebrated the centennial of Conlon Nancarrow’s
birth. The orchestra (which featured an array of modified
percussion instruments originally developed by Nancar-
row, illustrated in Fig. 2) epitomizes Trimpin’s practice of
extending and spatially expanding the original scores, play-
ing a variety of Nancarrow’s compositions across an array
of pianos and percussion devices [11]. The Nancarrow Per-
cussion Orchestra, alongside ConlonInPurple and Klompen,
serves as a hybridization of Trimpin’s approach and Nancar-
row’s composition: After decades of studying Nancarrow’s
compositions, Trimpin has brought his sculptural sound art
installation background to bear, fusing the “visceral excite-
ment and structural elegance” of Nancarrow’s scores with
the reactive instruments that spread the sound throughout
a listening space. Indeed, while the act of transcoding Nan-
carrow’s scores from their original piano rolls into the MIDI
format is a worthwhile endeavor from a scholarly perspec-
tive (affording much potential digital analysis of the scores),
Trimpin’s extension, interpretation and reinstrumentation of
the compositions has exposed many new audiences to Nan-
carrow’s groundbreaking works.
  9 This is shown in Jim Murphy, Ajay Kapur and Dale Carnegie, “Musi-
cal Robotics in a Loudspeaker World: Developments in Alternative
Approaches to Localization and Spatialization,” Leonardo Music
Journal 22 (2012) pp. 41–48.
10 ConlonInPurple: Sound Installation by Trimpin, press release, Suyama
Space, Seattle, WA (1 July 1999).
11 Trimpin: Nancarrow Percussion Orchestra / MATRIX 244, press re-
lease, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific
Film Archive, Berkeley, CA (2012).
Manuscript received 2 January 2017.
Jim Murphy is a sonic artist and researcher based in Wel-
lington, New Zealand. His work focuses on the development
of new mechatronic musical instruments, as well as the means
by which audiences and musicians may interface with these
instruments.
Trimpin is a Seattle-based artist whose artwork focuses on
the development of kinetic sound sculptures. Trimpin’s work
has appeared internationally, and he is a 1997 recipient of a
MacArthur Fellowship.