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Automata On The March
OldSchool writes "The Morris Museum (NJ) was recently awarded The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of 700 historic mechanical musical instruments and automata (mechanical figures). The extraordinary collection represents one of the most significant of its kind in the world.
There's pictures, demos, and animation of these devices at the museum website."
You just know that the museum director has gone mad and is currently hatching a diabolical scheme to get Data in that collection, too...
---
she won't let you fly, but she might let you sing
My Formal Languages and Automata Theory class is finally going to be useful!
Play some free games
why is this stuff that matters ?
It's in Jersey...
I wonderd if they have the skeleton of that little person they used in that automagic chess "machine?"
It's got to be incomplete without an animatronic bear playing banjo and singing, "It's a small world after all."
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Sounds like the DoD procurement department.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'm assuming they're finite state, otherwise that would make for a rather surreal museum experience.
Don't you have to win a reward?
Sounds more like they were just willed this stuff to show case.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
In Ironforge, near Tinker Town. They have a mechaniod museum there with some interesting exhibits. I stopped in there before making another linen run - man I've been playing too much WoW since it came out last week...
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Sept 27 2007 the little drummer boy becomes self aware
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
York in England used to have a museum of automata which I went to once, the York Museum of Automata, but it closed down - back in 1996, apparently. I wonder what happened to its collection - there were some impressive pieces...
This was posted 2 days ago on Boing Boing.
Get moving, boys. We're wating for our sexbots.
--- Ban humanity.
Not to rain on your parade or anything, but flautist is a perfectly good synonym for flutist.
Seriously though, a music playing ring does seem pretty bling-bling. An ancient cow-herders song is unlikely to impress the ladies though...
Daar is nie 'n lepel nie
...that looked at the title and thought "Cool! An interview with Hopcroft and Ullman."
Then I click and see the doll dusting the picture, and I go mad Cthluthlu-style.
Whever I look at those automatons, I can't help but think robotics and programming. The drums encoded the music and all. I wondered how much this inspired automata theory in computer science... I wonder if learning about automatons and watch making will give one an edge in robotics making today.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I demonstrate this concept at www.distortionfile.com
And on the next USR download, they will take over the world!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
hey, some of this compares favourably to what the music industry wants us to buy
What keeps me going is my inertia.
I wonder if they have all those wind-up and battery powered toys that were popular in the 50's and 60's. Go Robbie!
As a geek, I always found the Automata fascinating, even from my youngest days. It was the science, it was the art, and it was the sheer ambition and talent that it took to create these things that amazed me. Art that moves and acts, science in motion.
I'm glad to see this and hope I can visit it. It's always good to understand one's technical past.
I wonder if there will be a museum of programming some day? Will there be ancient systems running Half-Life? Will people marvel that a PS2 could "do all that when it was so prmitive", etc. Will we, crotchey old geeks, go there and reminisce?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Jeez, a "vibrant educational and cultural center in New Jersey"? I live ~5 minutes from there...went to church right around the corner for a while...
:-)
I'd hardly call it a "vibrant" anything! Well, they did have a Harley exhibit once, it was pretty cool....but it's such a small place. I guess then it's fitting that they have these small objects for show
AccountKiller
The Musee des Arts and Metiers in Paris (France!) has a couple of rooms of automata. They show the objects and have movies of them working.s /info.html
http://www.paris.org/Musees/Arts.Metier
DeBence Antique Music World has some great stuff along the same lines... and an antique website to match.
Did anyone else wonder if they'd have an extremely elaborate mechanical head that would somehow explain the Neuromancer story?
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
next time i'm in nj i'll (nevermind).... atlantic city wins again.
Get your torrents...
Actually, player pianos can sound really cool, and they are NOT obsolete antiques from the past.
The sound is completely real, even better than the most costly surround system that ever excisted.
That is, if you tune the piano and restore the inner workings correctly, of course, in addition to being a good pianolist.
The automatic mechanism operates via a complex maze of vacuum hoses, valves and pneumatics (small bellows) and the piano roll which contains holes read by a tracker bar which tell small pneumatics when to collapse, which in order, moves the keys of the regular piano, something which is further illustrated and explained here.
Nearly all player pianos can be played by hand as a regular piano by the way. One interesting detail is that on European pianos, the keys often don't move when the player plays automatically, while on most of the american ones, the keys move like we see in those western movies. Some pianos have electrical driven pumps, most others have foot pedals - mine has both! Pianos with food pedals are very easy to pump, if they are in tight working condition!
Here are a some examples of high quality mp3 recordings of two old pianos, one Stroud pianola residing in an art café, called Thomasgaarden in the old norwegian copper mining town Røros and my own Weber Pianola !
Lion Tamer Rag Artcraft roll played on the Weber piano
Frühlingsrauschen by the norwegian composer Christian Sinding. Aeolian roll played on the Stroud piano
American Patrol Aeolian roll played on the Stroud piano
Chicago March Artcraft roll played on the Weber piano
Can-can Some old noname roll played on the Stroud piano
And yes, I also recorded St. Lois Blues and Tiger Rag when I visited that café last summer.
One should notice that even if the Stroud pianola is somewhat untuned, its tone is quite better than mine, which sounds more like a perfectly tuned home piano ready for taking those boring piano lessons. But guess what - there no more boring piano lessons to take when you have an automatic piano!
And if I need more rolls, My friend Douglas Henderson, who is the mastermind behind Artcraft still supplies newly made rolls!
Artcraft is by the way a one man business where the rolls are made the hard way with this amazing punching equipment.
Here are some pictures of the inside of my piano - and yes, I should long ago made a home page with these pictures.
Did you by the way get distracted by the LGB train on top of my Weber piano?
Anyway - here are some more pictures from the inside of the piano too, here's the wind motor which pulls the roll and the