Piano roll

A piano roll is a special kind of music storage medium used to play a player piano, piano player, or reproducing piano. Imagine a long roll of paper with tiny holes punched in it. These holes tell the piano which notes to play and when. As the paper moves over a reading part called a tracker bar, the piano plays the music just like a person would.

Piano rolls have been used since at least 1896, and some companies like QRS Music still make them today with thousands of different titles. Even though most people now use digital music, piano rolls were very important for saving and playing music before computers existed. Special software can even show music in a way that looks like a piano roll.

The very first paper rolls were made by Welte & Sons in 1883 for their orchestrions. Today, the Musical Museum in Brentford, London, has one of the biggest collections of piano rolls in the world, with over 20,000 rolls and many old instruments to see and hear.

Buffalo Convention

In the early days of player pianos, piano rolls came in different sizes and styles. There were three main musical scales used. The 65-note format, covering the range from A1 to C♯7, began in 1896 in the United States. By 1900, a format that used all 88 notes of a standard piano (from A0 to C8) was introduced. Then in 1902, a German format with 72 notes was created.

On December 10, 1908, leaders from major U.S. player piano companies met in Buffalo, New York to create common standards. They agreed on a roll width of 11 1/4 inches and set rules for how the holes should be placed. This made it easier for different pianos to play different rolls, even if some special features were lost. These standards helped make piano rolls more universal around the world.

Metronomic, hand played, and reproducing rolls

Metronomic rolls are made by arranging the music slots without a real-time performance from a musician. When played back, the music is steady and metronomic, allowing a player-pianist to create their own performance using hand controls on the piano.

Hand played rolls capture the real-time performance of pianists playing on a piano connected to a recording machine. When played back, these rolls reproduce the original performance at a constant speed. Reproducing rolls are similar to hand played rolls but include extra codes to control the dynamics of the piano, aiming to replicate the original performer's expression. These reproducing pianos were marketed as bringing the "soul" of the performer into people's homes.

Main article: reproducing piano

Compositions for pianola and reproducing piano

The player piano allowed composers to create music that was impossible for people to play by hand. Over a hundred composers wrote music just for player pianos during the 20th century. Famous composers like Igor Stravinsky, Alfredo Casella, and Paul Hindemith tried out this new way of making music. Some composers, like Conlon Nancarrow, focused mostly on player pianos.

Certain brands, such as Duo-Art, Ampico, and Welte-Mignon, made special piano rolls that could copy exactly how an artist played—the notes and the way they pressed the keys—when played back on these pianos.

Reproducing pianos

Rolls for the reproducing piano were made from recordings of famous musicians. A pianist would play a special recording piano, and the notes they played would be marked on a paper roll. This roll could then be used to play back the performance on a reproducing piano.

Many famous pianists and composers had their performances recorded this way, including Gustav Mahler, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, Teresa Carreño, Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Scott Joplin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin, Jelly Roll Morton, and George Gershwin. Other companies also recorded many talented musicians, preserving their unique styles for future listeners.

Legal protectability against copying

The case White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company, 209 U.S. 1 (1908), decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, ruled that makers of music rolls for player pianos did not need to pay royalties to composers. The court said these piano rolls were not copies of the copyrighted sheet music but parts of the machine that played the music.

Later, Congress changed this with an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909. This new law protected piano rolls and introduced a compulsory license for making and selling these musical works.

In digital audio workstations

In modern digital audio workstation software, the term "piano roll" describes a visual tool for creating and editing music. It lets users pick the pitch, length, and strength of notes without playing them on a keyboard. Early music programs in the 1980s, like MacroMind's MusicWorks, used similar grid-based editors. Today, most music software includes a piano roll feature, popularised by Cubase in 1989.

Research

At the Academy of the Arts Bern (HKB), a series of research projects has been ongoing since 2007. Many of these projects are supported by the Swiss National Fund of Research. As part of a special project called Agora, HKB provides short films, texts, and resources about various topics for people to learn and explore.