Player Piano Rolls | Hacker News Reader

Player Piano Rolls

omeka-s.library.illinois.edu

63 pointsbrudgers44 comments

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.

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).

Yes it is hammers, but the big bells. The holes in the paper are 3×1 mm or so, and the hammers are about the size of a sledge hammer, but counter balanced. It definitely needs the vacuum amps.

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

Also worth noting is that his music was rather avant-garde. A predecessor of "black midi," if you will.

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.

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

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.

I love this background information. I hope you’re backing up those MIDI files!

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.

> but Liberace might be spinning in his grave

At 10000 rpm, not one less.

Not 78?

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...

> "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?

> “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.”

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.

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.

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.

Looks like the magic word is "digitize", and yes, it's a thing - see e. g. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~kittyshi/pianoroll/pianoroll.htm...

Found this fun video from the 1980's about the QRS roll production from the QRS site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3FTaGwfXPM

I came across a player piano in a charity shop - they really wanted rid of it and I bought it for cash I had in my wallet, and much less than it cost have a piano movers deliver it for me (which was surprisingly cheap itself tbh!).

It's in quite some state of disrepair, with most of the tubes rotted. I'm (very slowly) restoring it. It's fun but it's a piano too, so that part needs restoring first, and then the player mechanism next. So many small parts to attend to.

Anyway, they can be quite cheap to get if you're happy with a broken one, because they're hard to move (they are even heaver than a normal piano!). Just try get one that at least works ok as a piano!

https://johnleach.co.uk/posts/2023/06/27/i-went-to-the-denti...

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's also a piano player museum in Amsterdam, should they not be interested: https://www.pianolamuseum.online/en/

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

For your build versus buy decision, https://www.qrsmusic.com/PNOScan.php

Love that this company is still around. I've seen some of their rolls in the wild but assumed they were long gone!

Sweet! Do you have anything written up yet?

Wild that it uses vacuum to detect a hole in the roll.

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.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952) has a lot of relevance these days. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)

I wonder how many times people would "hack" the "program" on the paper roll by cutting new openings or blocking existing ones.

Improvisation please.

"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.

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