[HN Gopher] Player Piano Rolls
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Player Piano Rolls
Author : brudgers
Score : 62 points
Date : 2025-05-30 02:58 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (omeka-s.library.illinois.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (omeka-s.library.illinois.edu)
| jf wrote:
| I clicked on the link guessing, and then hoping, that it would
| have MIDI files of the piano rolls. Not so, but archive.org has
| at least 14,233: https://archive.org/details/pianorollmusic.com-
| midifiles
| brudgers wrote:
| I found the link because I was curious if player piano rolls
| could record live playing. Yes.
|
| What sparked my curiosity is 21 Pianomation Floppy disks that
| arrived yesterday with a recently eBay'd Yamaha Midi Data Filer
| 3. Pianomation is a system QRS corporation fits on grand pianos
| to allow them to operate as player pianos.
|
| QRS is still in business and started out making piano rolls
| around 1900 and quickly invented a machine to record pianists
| live performances. https://www.qrsmusic.com/
|
| Anyway, the floppy disks are approximately album length
| collections of Midi files and quite a few of the Midi files say
| who played the piano. Given when some of the players died, the
| Midi is almost certainly converted from piano rolls.
|
| I've been playing them back through a Yamaha General Midi era
| piano voice...and $10,000 hands on a two dollar guitar surely
| does sound better than two dollar hands on a $10,000 guitar.
|
| But Liberace might be spinning in his grave...I ran his data
| into the Honky Tonk Piano.
| jf wrote:
| I love this background information. I hope you're backing up
| those MIDI files!
| brudgers wrote:
| Probably not.
|
| I expect to test the rest of them...I suspect they all
| work...then resell them on eBay.
|
| Backing up data is not a hobby that interests me, hard copy
| rolls exist, the company is still in business, and the
| files are still under copyright.
| pantulis wrote:
| > but Liberace might be spinning in his grave
|
| At 10000 rpm, not one less.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Not 78?
| nofunsir wrote:
| Fun trivia about piano rolls and copyright which us software
| nerds might find interesting:
|
| "White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company, 209
| U.S. 1 (1908), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the
| United States which ruled that manufacturers of music rolls for
| player pianos did not have to pay royalties to the composers."
|
| "The main issue was whether or not something had to be directly
| perceptible (meaning intelligible to an ordinary human being)
| for it to be a "copy."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-Smith_Music_Publishing_C...
| zeven7 wrote:
| > "The main issue was whether or not something had to be
| directly perceptible (meaning intelligible to an ordinary
| human being) for it to be a "copy."
|
| Why doesn't the same argument apply to a CD? or an MP3?
| medler wrote:
| > "This case was subsequently eclipsed by Congress's
| intervention in the form of an amendment to the Copyright
| Act of 1909, introducing a compulsory license for the
| manufacture and distribution of such "mechanical"
| embodiments of musical works."
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| A CD and MP3s consist of recorded performances. A player
| piano roll contains the instructions for a performance,
| basically a transcription of sheet music, or a recording of
| someone performing a work. (Didn't read court findings for
| scope.)
|
| Works (sheet music and lyrics) and recordings (committing
| it to media or storage) and performances can be distinctly
| copyrighted and separately licensed. But a CD track
| represents all 3 of those put together through "sweat of
| the brow", usually by multiple parties.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Not strictly true. Player piano rolls were not made by
| mechanical transciption; a human actually played the
| music into a recording device (at least towards the end
| of the era). Because of this, we have a "recording" of
| Scott Joplin playing one of his rags. Dynamics are not
| preserved, but actual timing is.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Any idea how they generate these? It seems like you could
| unroll a piano roll, scan it optically, and generate MIDI from
| it, but I'm having trouble searching because "MIDI" + "piano
| roll" leads only to piano rolls in digital audio workstations.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Looks like the magic word is "digitize", and yes, it's a
| thing - see e. g. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~kittyshi/pianor
| oll/pianoroll.htm...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Wild that it uses vacuum to detect a hole in the roll.
| nofunsir wrote:
| I have a working 105+ year old player. Designing a non-
| destructive way to convert it to be MIDI-controlled and still
| retain the original function. :)
| brudgers wrote:
| For your build versus buy decision,
| https://www.qrsmusic.com/PNOScan.php
| jspaetzel wrote:
| Love that this company is still around. I've seen some of
| their rolls in the wild but assumed they were long gone!
| jf wrote:
| Sweet! Do you have anything written up yet?
| darthcircuit wrote:
| This article mentions the piano having electric billows for the
| suction necessary to operate the piano. I had the opportunity to
| play a piano similar, but with foot pump billows. It took some
| doing to keep it going! Although the one I played was quite old
| and in rough shape. It leaked air, but once it was going it was
| great fun.
| irrational wrote:
| That's the kind we have. The kids enjoy seeing how fast they
| can pump the pedals to try to get the songs to play faster.
| Peteragain wrote:
| Our village church has player piano bells. Only 8 (so it can't
| play God save the King) but most Sundays Colin plays something to
| wake us up. Colin restored the mechanism a few years ago. The
| holes are too small to pass enough vacuum (sic) to ring 27 tons
| of bell, to there are 2 banks of "vacuum amplifiers" .. and the
| vacuum head that reads the paper has a feedback loop to align it
| with the paper. Wow.
| tgv wrote:
| Are you sure it rings the large bells? A carrillon usually has
| (much) smaller bells. The 50 bells of the carillon in the
| cathedral here weigh around 25.000kg in total, and are played
| by hammers, not by traditional "ringing" (which would make it
| hard to control rhythmically).
| addaon wrote:
| Well this is completely off-topic, but the thought was
| prompted...
|
| I have been working through the Levar Burton Reads podcast while
| driving, and just last weekend listened to his reading of Amar
| El-Mohtar's "Pockets," in which a player piano roll plays an
| important, well, role.
|
| Levar does a short recap at the end of each story... and for this
| story, I ended up with a /very/ different understanding of the
| story than he did -- his uplifting, optimistic understanding is
| absolutely consistent with the words of the story... but ignores
| that the piano roll is not just an arbitrary object (like,
| perhaps, the pomander is), but /is a piano roll/, which has
| meaning in the story's universe. And I think with that
| considered, the alternate reading is much more sinister...
|
| Anyhow, "Reading Rainbow for adults" is pretty awesome, and
| hopefully the above hint pushes a few people to check it out.
| cturner wrote:
| I have in the region of 200 piano rolls in London. Classical
| emphasis, for example, lots of bach and beethoven. The piano
| player itself is long gone. The roll collection has been picked
| over, there will be no monetary high value items. If anyone wants
| the collection, we could coordinate, I am cratuki at the google
| service.
| SlackSabbath wrote:
| The Musical Museum in Brentford might take them off your hands.
| They have a large collection of fully operational and lovingly
| restored self-playing instruments.
| tgv wrote:
| There's also a piano player museum in Amsterdam, should they
| not be interested: https://www.pianolamuseum.online/en/
| mikecarlton wrote:
| Found this fun video from the 1980's about the QRS roll
| production from the QRS site.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3FTaGwfXPM
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I wonder how many times people would "hack" the "program" on the
| paper roll by cutting new openings or blocking existing ones.
| alex_young wrote:
| Improvisation please.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I museum I went to many years ago had a functioning player-piano
| playing the Gershwin _Rhapsody In Blue_ reproducing roll. It had
| an impressive amount of dynamic variation for a purely mechanical
| reproduction made with 1914-era technology (recording was made in
| 1925, but per TFA the reproducing roll technology was introduced
| in 1914).
| vintermann wrote:
| Many years ago, I had some fun training simple machine learning
| models on piano roll midis I'd downloaded from various public
| repositories.
|
| Here's a "waltz" produced by a grid-lstm, a long obsolete LSTM
| variant:
|
| https://m.soundcloud.com/vintermann/lstm-waltz
|
| Probably more interesting to get a feel for the failure modes of
| old LSTM variants than for the music, but maybe someone on hacker
| news will appreciate it.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Worth noting the great master of the player piano roll as an
| instrument in itself was Conlon Nancarrow
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow
| tgv wrote:
| Also worth noting is that his music was rather avant-garde. A
| predecessor of "black midi," if you will.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Certainly I will. That's a great analogy, to the point that
| you could argue he WAS 'black midi', just on a related
| instrument. He was doing no-velocity black midi on a
| mechanical instrument.
| bambax wrote:
| Related, one of my all-time favorite youtube videos, Joe Rinaudo
| on the American Fotoplayer: https://youtu.be/S5nHjCWl_Xg?t=81
|
| If you've never seen it, do yourself a favor.
| bgwalter wrote:
| "AI" people are grasping at straws in order to point out old
| "automation".
|
| Piano rolls were popular for a while before the advent of better
| recording techniques. The artists that recorded them were
| superstars _and all credit went to them_. It increased their
| popularity.
|
| Piano rolls enable us to (very imperfectly) listen to Busoni, von
| Sauer and other giants. They are unambiguously a good thing.
| bityard wrote:
| In the house I grew up in, we had an old upright player piano
| with at least 250 rolls sitting in a rack on top. The piano
| itself was severely out of tune and a bunch of the key tops were
| missing. The piano had a motor and vacuum, but neither worked, so
| you had to pump the pedals to make it play.
|
| I spent many rainy afternoons sitting at that thing. I always
| wanted to fix it up and make it work (and look) like it was
| supposed to, but my parents sold it before I was old enough to
| acquire the skill to do so.
| davidjade wrote:
| I have a pretty vivid memory of reading an article in the late
| 70's or 80's in a computer magazine (BYTE?) of a
| hardware/software project to digitize piano rolls. They were
| digitizing original Gershwin (he created a lot of piano rolls)
| and discovering new things about the way he played. I've search
| and searched but cannot find that article anywhere.
| coisasdavida wrote:
| I often use the term "pianola" to search the Vinted plataform for
| keyboards. Apparently italians use this term for stuff they don't
| think too much of. Recently I used the same "trick" on the
| Wallapop plataform. But Wallapop has a higher dose of spanish and
| portuguese in the mix. They use the term in a different way and
| the search results are usually flooded with piano rolls. It would
| be cool to buy all those lots just to check out which songs they
| contain.
| allturtles wrote:
| Kurt Vonnegut's _Player Piano_ (1952) has a lot of relevance
| these days. [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)
| mmmlinux wrote:
| If any one in Maryland wants the player part out of a player
| piano please let me know its taking up space in my house. I had
| plans to make it a MIDI machine, but it's been years... yours for
| free if you come get it. 10$ if you make me drag it somewhere.
| quantified wrote:
| I grew up with a player piano, and watching it play was as good
| as listening to it. Intuitive, not complex in interactions but
| sizable, like an 96-bit data bus. Tubes to ferry air from the
| pump to 88 keys, plus volume and pedal controls. Of course with
| my first computer I wanted to digitize this, but breaking into
| the antique hardware was not a welcome idea to the owner.
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