Ise Katagami vs Player Piano Roll
伊勢型紙 / 自動ピアノロール
Ise Katagami comes from Stencil Printing and Player Piano Roll from Notation Systems. One is technique and the other style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Ise Katagami
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Dyeing stencils cut from persimmon-tannin laminated paper: drill, tool and stripe cutting produce continuous patterns so fine that the stencils themselves startled fin-de-siècle Europe as an art of line.
Player Piano Roll
A recording medium of rolled paper on which the punched holes are the performance itself. It marks the turn from scores read by people to codes read by machines, and it is the ancestor of the punch card and the digital sequencer.
| Ise Katagami | Player Piano Roll | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | Muromachi period– | 1896–1930s |
| Family | Stencil Printing | Notation Systems |
| Kind | Technique | Style |
| Cues | Cut continuous patterns / The brown of tannin paper / Hairline parallel stripe cutting / Positive-negative design | Rows of perforations / The scrolling roll / Machine-readable music / Performance physically recorded |
| Best used for | Surfaces where a repeating pattern leads, in textile, wall or packaging · Die-cut and laser work whose design lives on the figure-ground relation | Exhibiting performance data as an object a machine visibly reads · Visualizing the structure of a piece on a scrolling time axis |
| Type | No lettering, the pattern unit itself becomes what is read | Hole length is duration and lateral position is pitch, never varied |
| Composition | Units stepped so the seam disappears, density even across the field | Time runs with the take up, control holes pushed to both margins |
| Material | Tannin-brown paper against cut white, lines kept thick enough to hold | Paper moves with humidity, so leave reading tolerance between holes |
| Caution | Repeating a unit without studying the step makes vertical and horizontal streaks surface, and from a distance the pattern reads only as a grid. | Punching every fine note thins the paper bridges until they tear, and the performance breaks down partway through the roll. |