In this article we present some information about digitizing and emulating music rolls in order to produce beautiful midi files that you can listen to on modern self-playing pianos such as Yamaha Disklavier.
What are piano rolls?
Music rolls usually consist of rolled-up paper on a spool core with two wooden flanks on the side and small attachments so that they can be used and moved in a pianola instrument. They are the medium with which the self-playing pianos (pianola, phonola, etc.) were able to play music at the beginning of the 20th century. It required a sophisticated recording or arranging technique and elaborate work steps to record the music on paper in the form of punched holes for the notes as well as their strength, duration etc. - and equally sophisticated playback pianos to be able to hear them. In the 1880s, the Welte company in Freiburg obtained a patent for music rolls made of paper and used them for their orchestrions. We have on this website under interesting facts a lot of details to music rolls.
Hundreds of thousands of music titles were produced on music rolls all over the world up to around 1940. Among them are historically very important titles, recorded by renowned pianists and composers, some of which have only survived in this music roll form. Welte (Freiburg), Hupfeld (Leipzig), Philipps (Frankfurt), Ampico (East Rochester, N.Y.), and Aeolian (New York) were the largest producers of these hand-recorded sheet music rolls, which also offered so-called reproduction rolls. These so-called reproduction rolls contain all the information of a recording in order to reproduce the piece of music almost exactly as the artist of the time played it on the recording piano.
Above all - but not only - we digitize these important recordings on reproduction music rolls and create emulations in Midi format from them so that they can also be enjoyed on modern self-playing pianos. Perhaps the greatest advantage of a modern self-playing piano working with Midi files is that you are not - as in the past - tied to a roll system with a proprietary format by the respective instrument, but can listen to the most beautiful music from all manufacturers on one instrument. Here is an example. S. Rachmaninoff only recorded for Ampico - and today we can experience his recordings on modern pianos.
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What is MIDI?
Moderne Selbstspielsysteme nutzen meistens MIDI (1982, Musical Instrument Digital Interface). There is already detailed information on Midi on many websites, so here is just a simplified description with reference to pianos. Midi is a kind of language with which computers and musical instruments can communicate. A Midi file contains a lot of information that gives a musical instrument the necessary instructions to produce sounds at a desired pitch, velocity and duration and to perform other actions (e.g. pedaling).
Midi unterstützt bis zu 127 Töne (ein Piano hat meistens 88) und 128 (1-127, 0 ist aus) Geschwindigkeitsstufen je Ton, mit der der Hammer gegen eine Saite geschleudert wird. Diese Geschwindigkeit korreliert mit der unterschiedlich wahrgenommenen Anschlagsstärke eines Tones.
Yamaha advertises the Pro System with 1024 levels (1020 on the Steinway Spirio) of key release speed and 256 levels of pedaling. In modern Yamaha Disklavier Enspire pianos, two systems work together to constantly monitor and adjust the position of each individual key - and at the same time the actual speed of the hammer. Both allow an accuracy beyond the audible - just as with the best reproduction pianos in the past, so that the reproduction comes very close to real playing. The pedal function can also use appropriate position measurements to reproduce not only on/off, as was often the case with early self-playing pianos, but also 256 intermediate stages. Midi files have only a few kilobytes and are organized in any number of tracks, usually each track controls one instrument. One track - usually the first one - contains the so-called metadata and the copyright information.
The road from piano roll to midi is long
Even the road to the music roll was long and laborious back then. When Welte began recording the playing of pianists in 1904, complicated technology and a lot of experienced personnel were required to produce a reproducible music roll from the recording.
Ideally, the composer himself recorded the piece, as for example Camille Saint-Saens, Edvard Grieg and many more, the notes played and the pedal as well as the dynamics were recorded in lines and with additional notes by editors in the room. These ingredients were brought together to form a so-called master roll, from which sellable copies were then punched. Today, it is clear that every punched roll of the same piece of music is slightly or sometimes very different, mainly due to the production methods of the time and subsequent editing.
We have been digitizing these rare music rolls for years and can use them to punch new copies, among other things, but also to create emulations that can be played on modern self-playing pianos - as in the video above with the piano rolls of S. Rachmaninoff.
The digitized rolls not only allow this beautiful music to be heard on the Yamaha Disklavier, for example, but are also valuable for interpretation research in order to learn more about the compositional and performance practice of this golden age.
Midi does not understand holes in the paper
It takes a lot of expertise to make a good midi file out of a digitized music roll. Good means that the emulated midi file does justice to the intention of the music roll and reproduces the piece of music on the modern piano as it would have been played as a music roll on a perfectly adjusted reproduction piano. Thanks to a kind loan from the Bern University of the Arts (HKB), we are digitizing with their powerful scanner (see cover picture). The 'optical scan' form shown in the diagram above is the best form of digitization in terms of archiving. A pneumatic scanner uses an emulator to provide excellent data for direct reproduction on a Disklavier. In both cases, a great deal of musical intuition and technical understanding is required to correctly transfer the information from a music roll into Midi format.
Numerous special features of a pneumatic system with a paper music roll have to be taken into account, e.g. the general inertia of the system, the increasing speed due to the decreasing diameter as the paper unrolls, the time intervals between stress and pedal commands as well as different sized holes in the sliding block, and much more. Only when all these effects are integrated into correctly timed midi commands can an authentic reproduction be achieved. And this is exactly what we strive for - authentic music on Yamaha Disklavier or PianoDisc. We offer the gems of this music on our website individually, as sets and for pianos purchased from us.
We believe that anyone who loves piano music and has or is looking for a piano will enjoy it most and for the longest time if it has a modern self-playing mechanism. Feel free to contact us.
