Introducing Stanford’s Digital Piano Roll Archive
The Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS) at Stanford University Libraries holds a major collection of perforated paper rolls for mechanical player pianos — otherwise known as piano rolls.
During their heyday around the turn of the twentieth century, player pianos spanned the globe and brought music into all kinds of homes and establishments. The rolls contained the data that brought the instruments to life. There were rolls geared to the tastes of immigrant communities; rolls turning out the latest hits; rolls documenting artists in emerging, soon-to-be hugely influential genres like ragtime and stride piano; and rolls with works by composers such as Chopin and Liszt performed by the great classical pianists of the era, and sometimes by the composers themselves.
With the advent of sound recording, phonographs supplanted player pianos, and the music captured on the rolls faded from public memory. Private individuals who recognized the rolls’ cultural value maintained collections and developed innovative methods for generating sound recordings from digital scans of the rolls.
Stanford has benefited from the expertise of this community and developed a formal program to preserve piano rolls digitally while making them widely accessible once again for research and enjoyment. This online exhibit provides digital access to a subset of Stanford’s roll collection via image files (full-color and monochrome), MIDI files, and audio files.
Piano rolls offer an aural window into an earlier era. We invite you to use this exhibit to search, browse, and explore the piano rolls in the collection; learn about the research conducted at Stanford on player pianos and rolls; and delve into the significance of piano rolls for the study of historical performance practice.
What is the relationship of the digital files to the original rolls?
Working with our partners, Stanford has developed a unique optical scanner that generates a master TIFF file from a piano roll. Each TIFF file is intended to permanently preserve the musical data on the original paper roll, encoded exactly as the data appears on the original. The TIFF file is the source for the image files as well as the MIDI and audio files.
Because a piano roll is essentially a set of instructions that is realized on a mechanical instrument, there is no single definitive sounded performance. We have drawn on the most current available research to generate a digital performance in the audio file that emulates the experience of having heard the rolls in the original on a well-maintained acoustic player piano.
Listening and access
Our digital files are freely available to download, whether for research or entertainment, to create recuts, or to generate new audio realizations using different software.
You can access the rolls through this exhibit and through the Stanford Libraries catalog, Searchworks, which also contains information about the original rolls. To find rolls in this exhibit, use the search function or visit the browse pages, which include curated selections from the roll collection.
See the section called “Accessing the rolls” for step-by-step instructions for hearing and downloading the files.