Long before sound was first recorded, music was recorded—first by written notation, then also by mechanical devices (e.g., music boxes). Automatic music reproduction traces back as far as the 9th century, when the Banū Mūsā brothers invented the earliest known mechanical musical instrument, in this case a hydropowered organthatplayed interchangeable cylinders. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "...cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century."[1][unreliable source?] The Banu Musa brothers also invented an automatic flute player, which appears to have been the first programmable machine.[2] According to Fowler, the automata were a robot band that performed "...more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection."[1] In the 14th century, Flanders introduced a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder. Similar designs appeared in barrel organs (15th century),musical clocks (1598), barrel pianos (1805), and musical boxes (ca.1800). The fairground organ, developed in 1892, used a system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books. The player piano, first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store an arbitrarily long piece of music. The most sophisticated of the piano rolls were "hand-played", meaning that the roll represented the actual performance of an individual, not just a transcription of the sheet music. This technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904. Piano rolls have been in continuous mass production since around 1898.[citation needed] A 1908 U.S. Supreme Court copyright case noted that, in 1902 alone, there were between 70,000 and 75,000 player pianos manufactured, and between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 piano rolls produced.[3] The use of piano rolls began to decline in the 1920s although one type is still being made today.
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