Joe Rinaudo Playing the American Fotoplayer | Know Your Meme

We discovered an interesting instrument on tour in the US - an American Fotoplayer! Should we take it with us to our next performances in Seattle, Portland, L.A. and San Francisco? | Igudesman & Joo

Songs That Should Not Work on Instagram: "🎥 Before movies had soundtracks, there was the American Fotoplayer. Built in the 1910s, it was a mechanical orchestra — a wild combination of player piano, organ pipes, drums, bells, and levers that let an operator create everything from thunder to train whistles in real time. Today, only a few still exist. One belongs to film historian Joe Rinaudo, who restored his Fotoplayer and still performs live silent film shows with it — using hand-cranked projec

Code Intellectus on Instagram: "Joe Rinaudo’s 1926 American Fotoplayer is a masterpiece of early cinema engineering - a hybrid machine that played music and sound effects for silent films before movies could talk. Built between 1912 and 1925, it fused a player piano, organ pipes, percussion, and manual sound triggers to bring entire theaters to life. Every emotion - laughter, suspense, romance - was performed in real time. When “talkies” arrived in the late 1920s, synchronized sound replaced it