On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 11:12:22AM -0500, Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) wrote:
>Some of the Allen Organs had a digital system where the tone quality was
>determined by an 80-column punched computer card, but these were high-end
>instruments, not really home organs. (Someone over on the Electronic
>Organ List hacked this system, and determined just how the cards were
>supposed to be punched in order to produce a certain sound)
Neat! I remember a snazzy tuner that was around in the 80s which used
a punch card, that's cool that they were used to encode tone quality
too. The tuner had a little circle of LEDs which would appear to "roll"
in one direction or the other, depending on which way you needed to go.
And the punch card allowed non-equal temperaments, great for harpsichordists
who don't feel like doing mean tone the equal-beating way. I wish I
remembered what these things were called so I could look for one...
What would be *really* neat would be an automatic harpsichord tuner, with
some kind of slow high-torque motor to turn the tuning pins. But I'll bet
the debugging process would involve breaking a whole lot of strings!
John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Mon Jun 26 2000 - 14:23:38 BST
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