[HN Gopher] Scanned piano rolls database
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Scanned piano rolls database
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 78 points
Date : 2025-07-12 22:27 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pianorollmusic.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pianorollmusic.org)
| irrational wrote:
| It's dead Jim.
|
| I assume we hugged it to death.
| ncr100 wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Super cool. Clicked on a title with the MIDI indicator and a MIDI
| file (.mid) downloaded. Came up in Garage Band and sounded nice.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Awesome.
|
| Did the same for Laugh Clown, Laugh - set the tempo to 110 bpm:
|
| http://www.pianorollmusic.org/html/mjose/midifiles/NonPDfile...
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| masfuerte wrote:
| 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.)
| zulko wrote:
| 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...
| StarlaAtNight wrote:
| Just curious, what made you go down that rabbit hole?
| zulko wrote:
| 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...
| vintagedave wrote:
| 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?
| zulko wrote:
| 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...
| vintagedave wrote:
| 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?
| willtemperley wrote:
| Hearing Debussy playing Debussy is magic enough for me.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Do you have a permalink?
| prvc wrote:
| 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
| iainmerrick wrote:
| 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.
| Bluestein wrote:
| "The neverending piano": Feed these to a tokenizer, vectorize,
| generate ... forever.-
| bookofjoe wrote:
| 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.
| ryandvm wrote:
| 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?
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(page generated 2025-07-17 23:02 UTC)