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

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

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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.

"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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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 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.