>>Recently I saw a Yamaha player piano which could strike the key(s)
>>with over 100 various pressures (not like the music box sound of an
>> old playerpiano).  A "real" person played a piece and the piano
>> "reproduced" that
>
> Not even a tuppence worth of addition to this thread: merely to note your
> message reminded me of an LP recording I have of piano music that had
> *originally* been recorded on player piano rolls by the composers
> themselves before (if I recall correctly) Edison invented *his* recording
> device.  Not, I suspect, as true to the original as this fancy schmancy
> Yamaha, but historically more impressive and certainly more interesting, at
> least to me.  Besides, I *like* player pianos -- and am exceedingly fond of
> the glass harmonica, to make things worse -- so my opinion in this regard
> is highly suspect, of course <grin>.
 
Piano rolls "recorded" by composers are a very significant source of
information about the way they wanted their music to be performed. The
Yamaha piano will probably never achieve equivalent significance because
of the existence of high quality sound recording media. Anyway, the
Yamaha, by admission of its own designers (heard at the source during a
dinner that they sponsored) and despite its other amazing attributes, does
not capture anything like all the data that would be necessary to
describe a performance (although it does do a far better job than the
venerable player piano).