Player Piano Paper
Ok, I’ll admit it. I have some canned patter that I pull out for art festivals. But when you meet hundreds of people in a weekend, there are only so many words you can use to describe your work.
One of my favorite things is to point to the beach in one of my landscapes. I ask festival-goers to guess what it is, and I have very rarely found anyone who gets it right. The closest they ever get is some sort of computer punch card, but that is still way off. The answer to my question is player piano paper.
So what is player piano paper? It’s the rolls of paper that run through the old self-playing mechanical pianos. The perforations in the paper tell the piano what notes to play. And there are lyrics printed along the side of the rolls so that you can sing along to the music.
They were the karaoke machines of the 19th century.
