Could any human being—say, Liberace if he was alive—actually perform the player piano’s parts?
DD: If you had 24 people, you could realize the part for any instrument, but the piece was written for a mechanical instrument. In the same way that a computer can’t play the way a human does, a human can’t play the way a computer does. And with the computer, you can have 150 sound occurrences at one instant. A human doesn’t have 150 fingers, and unless you prepared it a certain way, or used some sort of modified… No, no. The simple answer would be no way. But I’d love it if someone tried and proved me wrong. D: So how exactly does one play a sine-wave generator? DD: Well, the instrument, a sine-wave generator, has two main parts you can play. One is the macro tune, which multiplies the layers of waves times 10, times a hundred… I normally use the “times a thousand” range. Then you have the fine tune, which modifies the pitch, which I then run into a series of pedals and modulators. D: How does a square wave differ? DD: They’re different shapes and have different harmonic content, but
