Scanned piano rolls database

http://www.pianorollmusic.org/rolldatabase.php

by bookofjoe • 1 year ago

84 21 1 year ago

pianorollmusic.org

irrational• 1 year ago

It’s dead Jim.

I assume we hugged it to death.

ncr1002• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Super cool. Clicked on a title with the MIDI indicator and a MIDI file (.mid) downloaded. Came up in Garage Band and sounded nice.

ncr1002• 1 year ago

Awesome.

Did the same for Laugh Clown, Laugh - set the tempo to 110 bpm:

http://www.pianorollmusic.org/html/mjose/midifiles/NonPDfile...

bluGill• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.)

zulko3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Just curious, what made you go down that rabbit hole?

zulko3• 1 year ago

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...

vintagedave2• 1 year ago

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?

willtemperley2• 1 year ago

Hearing Debussy playing Debussy is magic enough for me.

prvc• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

"The neverending piano": Feed these to a tokenizer, vectorize, generate ... forever.-

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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?

waffletower• 1 year ago

It is a shame that you can't access the scanned piano rolls of Conlon Nancarrow's player piano music in an archive like this. The scans do exist apparently, but are merely documented on the web (https://www.paul-sacher-stiftung.ch/en/research/1-2-Conlon-N...) without explicit download access. An incredibly comprehensive Youtube video exists however: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfmVJmQKdj4

Scanned piano rolls database

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