- Pianola: https://zulko.github.io/pianola/ - upload a piano roll midi file, and it plays with the piano roll and keyboard animation (you can zoom on some parts, slow down etc).
What makes them interesting to you? Does the music sound different?
I've seen pianola rolls and even played one as a child. But I have wondered as an adult what the 'listening quality' of the music is / would be. What got you into them and could you share -- if you want to nerd out please do, I'm genuinely interested! -- what interested you about them?
When I was about 10 I picked my first ever CD at a music shop, and it was a recording of the Gershwin piano rolls, because the cover photo caught my eye [1]. I didn't really understand what I was listening to, I assumed "piano roll" was a musical genre, like "rock'n'roll", until years later when my English became good enough to read the CD's booklet.
It was also a time when all these midi files started being available, like the 6000 rolls from Terry Smythe [2], and I figured out transcribing these could be a good way to learn old-school Jazz, which is otherwise difficult to find as sheet music.
Does a piano roll sound different (I assume it does)? Ie, is or was there a specific market for a CD of a piano roll specifically, not, of someone playing the piano?
In terms of the music being played, piano rolls can be different from "normal piano music" because it's not played live by a real human, so it can have complex parts with full chords, additional voices, all with perfect rhythm and no wrong notes. This can be very compelling when well executed on the right songs (and it can also sound "mechanical" on others).
There isn't a huge market for piano roll recordings, and these recordings are rare. It's a niche topic that can attract
- Older people who have known the time piano rolls (say, until the 1950s)
- People nostagic of old times in general (in particular the 1910s-1940s), the age of early jazz with stride piano and early Broadway.
- Music scholars, because some of these rolls are of historical/musical importance, in particular those "recorded" by George Gershwin or Fats Waller and other big names. A lot of material exists only as piano rolls.
For the example of the Gershwin CD I posted above, it was produced by musicologist Artis Wodehouse [1] in parnership with the yamaha disklavier pianos iirc [2], so my guess is this was a passion project above all, with a bit of Yamaha marketing.
An interesting prospective project for a technically minded musician would be would be to find an automated way to "correct" the surviving corpus of Welte-Mignon[1] recordings. They were designed to capture the small nuances of performances (such as dynamics), and a large number of historically important musicians made recorded performances in this medium before the era of sound recording. In my strongly-held opinion, the rolls were marked in an uneven and imprecise way, making direct playback on anything but the original recording apparatus inaccurate. A common trait of modern renderings of these rolls as sound recordings (as found on CD or on Youtube) is an unevenness of tempo and a seeming lack of synchronization of voices (really piano keys). However, the mechanical quirks and imprecision in the recording apparatus must be regular enough to allow for a more accurate version of the performances to be reconstructed, without relying on unduly many aesthetic assumptions.
I learned about this a few years ago and was delighted to hear some actual performances by Debussy of his own pieces. I was unimpressed by the quality of the recordings, though (via replaying on a restored mechanism) so it's great to get a MIDI version now!
How did the Welte-Mignon actually work? It seems almost miraculous that the dynamics can be captured on a piano roll and replayed successfully. Not perfectly, as you say, but pretty damn close.
If you find a duplicate it often isn't. They often cut a bunch of rolls and then threw the master. If the roll proved popular they made a new master which would be slightly difierent but have the same catalog number. Tracing these 'editions' is often part of the fun.
If you want to play these in VLC you need a SoundFont (.sf2) file. There's a good list of SoundFont files here [1]. This VLC wiki page [2] explains how to configure VLC to use the SoundFont.
(I'm posting this because the vlc wiki is stale and sent me down a pointless rabbit hole on fluidsynth's old sourceforge site. I'd rather update the wiki. It tells me I need to create an account. When I try it tells me I don't have permission.)
This used to be one of my main hobbies, I listened to thousands of these and I am super grateful to the people scanning and hosting these collections.
Some software I wrote for piano roll analysis and transcription:
- Unroll: https://zulko.github.io/unroll-online/ - upload a piano roll midi file and have it quantized and converted to lilypond sheet music. More about the process in this blog: https://zulko.github.io/blog/2014/02/12/transcribing-piano-r...
- Pianola: https://zulko.github.io/pianola/ - upload a piano roll midi file, and it plays with the piano roll and keyboard animation (you can zoom on some parts, slow down etc).
Some transcriptions made with these tools:
- Hindustan: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--hindustan
- Gershwin - Sweet and Lowdown: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--Gershwin-sweet-and-low...
- Gershwin - Limehouse Nights: https://github.com/Zulko/-sheet-music--Gerhswin-Limehouse-Ni...
What makes them interesting to you? Does the music sound different?
I've seen pianola rolls and even played one as a child. But I have wondered as an adult what the 'listening quality' of the music is / would be. What got you into them and could you share -- if you want to nerd out please do, I'm genuinely interested! -- what interested you about them?
Hearing Debussy playing Debussy is magic enough for me.
Do you have a permalink?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W3NX_TrxfVk&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5t...
Just curious, what made you go down that rabbit hole?
When I was about 10 I picked my first ever CD at a music shop, and it was a recording of the Gershwin piano rolls, because the cover photo caught my eye [1]. I didn't really understand what I was listening to, I assumed "piano roll" was a musical genre, like "rock'n'roll", until years later when my English became good enough to read the CD's booklet.
It was also a time when all these midi files started being available, like the 6000 rolls from Terry Smythe [2], and I figured out transcribing these could be a good way to learn old-school Jazz, which is otherwise difficult to find as sheet music.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX9MCyO6smk
[2] https://archive.org/details/terrysmythe.ca-archive/mp3s/Ampi...
Does a piano roll sound different (I assume it does)? Ie, is or was there a specific market for a CD of a piano roll specifically, not, of someone playing the piano?
In terms of the music being played, piano rolls can be different from "normal piano music" because it's not played live by a real human, so it can have complex parts with full chords, additional voices, all with perfect rhythm and no wrong notes. This can be very compelling when well executed on the right songs (and it can also sound "mechanical" on others).
There isn't a huge market for piano roll recordings, and these recordings are rare. It's a niche topic that can attract
- Older people who have known the time piano rolls (say, until the 1950s)
- People nostagic of old times in general (in particular the 1910s-1940s), the age of early jazz with stride piano and early Broadway.
- Music scholars, because some of these rolls are of historical/musical importance, in particular those "recorded" by George Gershwin or Fats Waller and other big names. A lot of material exists only as piano rolls.
For the example of the Gershwin CD I posted above, it was produced by musicologist Artis Wodehouse [1] in parnership with the yamaha disklavier pianos iirc [2], so my guess is this was a passion project above all, with a bit of Yamaha marketing.
[1] https://www.artiswodehouse.com/biography/ [2] https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical_instruments/pianos/d...
An interesting prospective project for a technically minded musician would be would be to find an automated way to "correct" the surviving corpus of Welte-Mignon[1] recordings. They were designed to capture the small nuances of performances (such as dynamics), and a large number of historically important musicians made recorded performances in this medium before the era of sound recording. In my strongly-held opinion, the rolls were marked in an uneven and imprecise way, making direct playback on anything but the original recording apparatus inaccurate. A common trait of modern renderings of these rolls as sound recordings (as found on CD or on Youtube) is an unevenness of tempo and a seeming lack of synchronization of voices (really piano keys). However, the mechanical quirks and imprecision in the recording apparatus must be regular enough to allow for a more accurate version of the performances to be reconstructed, without relying on unduly many aesthetic assumptions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welte-Mignon
I learned about this a few years ago and was delighted to hear some actual performances by Debussy of his own pieces. I was unimpressed by the quality of the recordings, though (via replaying on a restored mechanism) so it's great to get a MIDI version now!
How did the Welte-Mignon actually work? It seems almost miraculous that the dynamics can be captured on a piano roll and replayed successfully. Not perfectly, as you say, but pretty damn close.
If you find a duplicate it often isn't. They often cut a bunch of rolls and then threw the master. If the roll proved popular they made a new master which would be slightly difierent but have the same catalog number. Tracing these 'editions' is often part of the fun.
If you want to play these in VLC you need a SoundFont (.sf2) file. There's a good list of SoundFont files here [1]. This VLC wiki page [2] explains how to configure VLC to use the SoundFont.
[1]: https://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth/wiki/SoundFont
[2]: https://wiki.videolan.org/Midi/
(I'm posting this because the vlc wiki is stale and sent me down a pointless rabbit hole on fluidsynth's old sourceforge site. I'd rather update the wiki. It tells me I need to create an account. When I try it tells me I don't have permission.)
Super cool. Clicked on a title with the MIDI indicator and a MIDI file (.mid) downloaded. Came up in Garage Band and sounded nice.
Awesome.
Did the same for Laugh Clown, Laugh - set the tempo to 110 bpm:
http://www.pianorollmusic.org/html/mjose/midifiles/NonPDfile...
At the bottom of page 1:
>Because of U.S. copyright restrictions, only songs published in 1929 and earlier available for public download from this page.
It’s dead Jim.
I assume we hugged it to death.
It's buckling. Keep trying if you're interested in it.
Or visit https://web.archive.org/web/20250716215135/http://www.pianor... to see SOME of the files. Sadly not the MIDI files ... which IMO are the meat of value of this HN post.
"The neverending piano": Feed these to a tokenizer, vectorize, generate ... forever.-
What am I missing here? There are a list of piano rolls that have been scanned but you can only download MIDI from before 1929.
I mean, I understand copyright and public domain law in the US, but what exactly is the point of a list of things you can't share?