A while back, [Jacob] played around with a player piano. After feeding a roll into the machine and trying ... resulting MIDI file isn’t in the right key, but that’s easily fixed by anyone ...

Player pianos work via a vacuum, where air is sucked through a few pin points in a piano roll with a bellows. A series of pipes leading to each key translate these small holes into notes.

Other manufacturers followed suit, and Steinway’s model has been the standard ever since. An 88-key piano has seven octaves plus three lower notes (B, B flat and A) below the bottom C. It has 52 white ...

Why are there 88 keys on a piano? Why not 44, or 200? Let’s go back to the days before the piano, when composers wrote for the harpsichord, which has just 60 keys, and each key is ...