- Pianola: https://zulko.github.io/pianola/ - upload a piano roll midi file, and it plays with the piano roll and keyboard animation (you can zoom on some parts, slow down etc).
What makes them interesting to you? Does the music sound different?
I've seen pianola rolls and even played one as a child. But I have wondered as an adult what the 'listening quality' of the music is / would be. What got you into them and could you share -- if you want to nerd out please do, I'm genuinely interested! -- what interested you about them?
When I was about 10 I picked my first ever CD at a music shop, and it was a recording of the Gershwin piano rolls, because the cover photo caught my eye [1]. I didn't really understand what I was listening to, I assumed "piano roll" was a musical genre, like "rock'n'roll", until years later when my English became good enough to read the CD's booklet.
It was also a time when all these midi files started being available, like the 6000 rolls from Terry Smythe [2], and I figured out transcribing these could be a good way to learn old-school Jazz, which is otherwise difficult to find as sheet music.
Does a piano roll sound different (I assume it does)? Ie, is or was there a specific market for a CD of a piano roll specifically, not, of someone playing the piano?
In terms of the music being played, piano rolls can be different from "normal piano music" because it's not played live by a real human, so it can have complex parts with full chords, additional voices, all with perfect rhythm and no wrong notes. This can be very compelling when well executed on the right songs (and it can also sound "mechanical" on others).
There isn't a huge market for piano roll recordings, and these recordings are rare. It's a niche topic that can attract
- Older people who have known the time piano rolls (say, until the 1950s)
- People nostagic of old times in general (in particular the 1910s-1940s), the age of early jazz with stride piano and early Broadway.
- Music scholars, because some of these rolls are of historical/musical importance, in particular those "recorded" by George Gershwin or Fats Waller and other big names. A lot of material exists only as piano rolls.
For the example of the Gershwin CD I posted above, it was produced by musicologist Artis Wodehouse [1] in parnership with the yamaha disklavier pianos iirc [2], so my guess is this was a passion project above all, with a bit of Yamaha marketing.
Some software I wrote for piano roll analysis and transcription:
- Unroll: https://zulko.github.io/unroll-online/ - upload a piano roll midi file and have it quantized and converted to lilypond sheet music. More about the process in this blog: https://zulko.github.io/blog/2014/02/12/transcribing-piano-r...
- Pianola: https://zulko.github.io/pianola/ - upload a piano roll midi file, and it plays with the piano roll and keyboard animation (you can zoom on some parts, slow down etc).
Some transcriptions made with these tools:
- Hindustan: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--hindustan
- Gershwin - Sweet and Lowdown: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--Gershwin-sweet-and-low...
- Gershwin - Limehouse Nights: https://github.com/Zulko/-sheet-music--Gerhswin-Limehouse-Ni...