Mind you, if I'd only heard the Edith Day rendition I don't think I'd have taken much notice. What attracted me about the recording at the top of the thread (which is available as a FLAC here, under no.20) was the sound and articulation of the automated violin (particularly the weird quasi-portamenti between some of the notes) and the strange sentimentality of it (the tune, the instrument, the fact that it's "just a machine")... hard to explain in words (though another kind of explanation will eventually be forthcoming).

The thing that struck me was the automated fingers - there's definitely a sound of hard metal fingers rather than soft human fleshy ones.  I'll have another listen later about the 'bow' - essentially isn't this thing nearer to a Hurdy gurdy?

Tommo

No, the fingers can't slide at all, the bowing speed has three settings (and this piece only seems to use one of them), the bow pressure is presumably adjustable but not while playing, the bow is always moving in the same direction, and last but not least the vibrato speed is constant, which is not something humans do (or even can do).

I find it a shame that the technology for making musical automata was taken to such a sophisticated level just as recording technology was also being developed, thus ensuring that expensive and complicated machines like this would become obsolete within a couple of decades of being state-of-the-art. However, they haven't died completely: Godfried-Willem Raes in Ghent has built an entire orchestra of robot instruments which are controlled by a computer but which otherwise are entirely "acoustic". Here are a few of them: one element of a "modular pipe organ", a player piano, hurdy-gurdy and bass tuba -

... and you can see all of them here.

Thanks to Richard and Pianola, I have stumbled across the Violina.

I don't think I have heard or seen anything quite like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUBQMl4ZiAg

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWmvpwmuyTY&feature=related

or:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdy5Ow6vk04&feature=related

Just amazing!  I feel inspired to get out my old scraggy fiddle and build a mechanical player for it.

Thank you

Tommo

First cousin of the hurdy-gurdy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DX08nQows0&feature=related

Tommo, somewhere at the head of this thread on curved bows, I think you mentioned the Hupfeld Phonoliszt Violina. Nice try, sunshine, but don't worry, because I intend to start a thread on player pianos, and they will fit in OK there. However, may I emphasize that I have never really heard a Hupfeld Phonoliszt Violina playing anything like as well as they all must have done when they were new. The YouTube videos are no different to what I have heard in the flesh, though I watched the one from the museum in Utrecht with a certain affection, because I know Dr Haspels of old, and he certainly likes to demonstrate his foreign languages as much as he does the instruments!

We have forgotten so much about the toning and regulation of pianos in the last hundred years, that almost no extant reproducing pianos play as they were intended to, let alone the ones with violins on top. I'll just bet that no-one has even thought about the tolerances of Phonoliszt Violina secondary valves. You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you! Please don't write off the concept of these instruments as a result of what you hear on YouTube, which is uniformly dreadful.

Cheers, Pianola

Amidst all the above, I have been wondering how any future development of the Violina (which was, I believe, the topic on the card) might frustrate the extra-musical enjoyment of violin performances gained by our own dear Lord Byron?  Marvel as we may at the technical achievement behind the contraption, it nevertheless deprives His Lordship of certain more visceral pleasures to be gained from watching fallible humankind wrestling with stringed instruments