The Player Piano Project and Reproducing Pianorolls

Reproducing piano rolls are among the early music storage mediums, preserving fine details of a piano or organ performance on a continuous roll of paper with holes punched onto them. However, due to limited availability of well maintained playback instruments and the condition of fragile paper, rolls have remained elusive and generally inaccessible for study. We aim to preserve the rolls through scanning, digitizing and expression decoding. We convert the raw image data into the MIDI files that contain the original performance expressions.

A first attemp in digitizing reproducing piano rolls

Start from an optical scan, we convert the raw image data into MIDI files.

Read our ISMIR 2017 paper on Modeling and Digitizing Reproducing Piano Rolls.

Current roll scanning progress

We are in the process of calibrating a new scanner to scan all our roll collections start with the red welte rolls.

Stanford University Piano Roll Archive

Our recent updates on piano roll are summarized at available at ISMIR 2019 Paper, and at Stanford University Piano Roll Archive