A piano roll is a music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano. Piano rolls, like other music rolls, are continuous rolls of paper with holes punched into them. These perforations represent note control data. The roll moves over a reading system known as a tracker bar; the playing cycle for each musical note is triggered when a perforation crosses the bar. Piano rolls have been in continuous production since at least 1896, and are still being manufactured today; QRS Music offers 45,000 titles with "new titles being added on a regular basis", although they are no longer mass-produced. MIDI files have generally supplanted piano rolls in storing and playing back performance data, accomplishing digitally and electronically what piano rolls do mechanically. MIDI editing software often features the ability to represent the music graphically as a piano roll, often with aids like a grid representing bars, beats, and other divisions, as well as shaded backgrounds representing the black and white keys of a piano. The first paper rolls were used commercially by Welte & Sons in their orchestrions beginning in 1883. A rollography is a listing of piano rolls, especially made by a single performer, analogous to a discography. The Musical Museum in Brentford, London, England houses one of the world's largest collections of piano rolls, with over 20,000 rolls as well as an extensive collection of instruments which may be seen and heard.
Buffalo Convention
In the early years of player pianos, piano rolls were produced in varying dimensions and formats. Most rolls used one of three musical scales. The 65-note format, with a playing range of A1 to C♯7, was introduced in 1896 in the United States, specifically for piano music. In 1900, an American format playing all 88 notes of the standard piano scale (A0 to C8) was introduced. In 1902, a German 72-note scale (F1, G1 to E7) was introduced. On December 10, 1908, a group representing most of the largest U.S. manufacturers of player pianos gathered in Buffalo, New York, to try to agree on some standards. The group settled on a width of 11+1⁄4 inches (286 mm) and perforation standards for 65-note rolls of 6 holes to the inch, and for 88-note rolls of 9 holes to the inch. That left margins at both ends for future developments. Any pianos built to those standards could play rolls made to them, albeit sometimes with a loss of special functionality. The formats became a loose world standard.
Metronomic, hand played, and reproducing rolls
Metronomic or arranged rolls are rolls produced by positioning the music slots without real-time input from a performing musician. The music, when played back, is typically purely metronomical. Metronomically arranged music rolls are deliberately left metronomic so as to enable a player-pianist to create their own musical performance (such as varying the dynamics, tempo, and phrasing) via the hand controls that are a feature of all player pianos. Hand played rolls are created by capturing in real time the hand-played performance of one or more pianists upon a piano connected to a recording machine. The production roll reproduced the real-time performance of the original recording when played back at a constant speed. (It became industry convention for recordings of music intended to be used for dancing to be regularized into strict tempo despite the original performance having the slight tempo fluctuations of all human performances, as due to the recording and production process, any fluctuations would be magnified/exaggerated in the finished production copy and result in an uneven rhythm.) Reproducing rolls are the same as hand-played rolls but have additional control codes to operate the dynamic modifying systems specific to whichever brand of reproducing piano it is designed to be played back on, producing an approximation of the original recording pianist's dynamics. Reproducing pianos were beyond the reach of the average home in the original era of popularity of these instruments and were heavily marketed as reproducing the 'soul' of the performer – slogans such as "The Master's Fingers On Your Piano" or "Paderewski will play for you in your own house!" were common.
Compositions for pianola and reproducing piano The player piano gives the opportunity to create music that is impossible for humans to play, or, more correctly, music that was not conceived in terms of performance by hand. Over one hundred composers wrote music specially for the player piano during the course of the 20th century. Many mainstream composers experimented with its possibilities, including Igor Stravinsky, Alfredo Casella, and Paul Hindemith; others, including Conlon Nancarrow, made it their primary milieu. The Duo-Art, Ampico, and Welte-Mignon brands were known as "reproducing" piano rolls, as they could accurately reproduce the touch and dynamics of the artist as well as the notes struck, when played back on capable pianos.
Reproducing pianos
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