Self-Playing Pipe Organ

Most large organs are electrically controlled anyway, and the keys are just on/off switches. All those organ stops control an overly complicated combination of electrical, mechanical, and pneumatic parts which implement a switching system to change the mapping between keyboard and pipes. This is just a logic function, but implemented with century old technology it's the size of a mainframe computer.

In modern pipe organs all that switchgear is replaced with a microprocessor. Once that's done, it's trivial to add MIDI in/out, and the organ console is often just MIDI keyboards. Self-playing is a standard feature today.

The Stanford Theater in Palo Alto has a modern pipe organ, and it was deliberately built without self-play. But that's because the place is a hobby project of somebody who inherited money from HP.

Former church pipe organist here. I've always thought organ is a great candidate for a digitally manipulated real instrument as playing with precision and feel is NOT dependent on fine motor functions as it is for most keyboard and string instruments.

Press velocity is not correlated with volume- in fact sound is not dependent on a key press at all. Organs don't really require percussive mechanical functions for a full range of control: an idea virtual/real instrument.

> the physical engineering was more problematic

I always find amusing how dealing with physical world is challenging even if you know everything about it in theory.

Like this scene from Big Bang Theory that I use as an example in every class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9en6AcVkBo

I find it interesting that both this and Wintergatan's Marble Machine were both self-playing instruments inspired by Matthias Wandel.

Finally, technology toots its own horn.