“This is not a copy”: Mechanical Fidelity and the Re-enacting PianoIn the early twentieth century, the American Piano Company built a “re-enacting piano,” which could play back performances recorded by virtuoso pianists. This article in the journal differences examines how an ideal of recording fidelity was socially produced around this technology, along different lines than the more familiar fidelity of audio recording. Through a commingling of traits that had formerly been considered either human or mechanical, the re-enacting piano offered a way to imagine human and machine performances as materially interchangeable and potentially identical.