Piano roll
On December 10, 1908, a group representing most of the largest U.S. manufacturers of player pianos gathered in Buffalo, New York, to try to agree on some standards.
Hand played rolls are created by capturing in real time the hand-played performance of one or more pianists upon a piano connected to a recording machine.
[7] Reproducing pianos can also re-create the dynamics of a pianist's performance by means of specially encoded control perforations placed towards the edges of a music roll.
Gustav Mahler, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, Teresa Carreño, Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Scott Joplin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin, Jelly Roll Morton and George Gershwin are amongst the composers and pianists who have had their performances recorded in this way.
Duo-Art featured artists such as Ignace Jan Paderewski, George Gershwin, Maurice Ravel, Teresa Carreño, Percy Grainger, Leopold Godowsky and Ferruccio Busoni.
The Ampico brand's featured artists included Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ferde Grofé, Leo Ornstein, Mischa Levitzki, Winifred MacBride, and Marguerite Volavy.
Welte-Mignon, the earliest reproducing system, recorded artists such as Gustav Mahler, Camille Saint-Saëns, Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Alexander Scriabin, Enrique Granados, Eugen d'Albert, Josef Lhévinne, Raoul Pugno, and Carl Reinecke (who was the earliest-born pianist to record in any media format).
This case was subsequently eclipsed by Congress's intervention in the form of an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909, protecting them and introducing a compulsory license for the manufacture and distribution of such "mechanical" embodiments of musical works.
In most modern digital audio workstation software, the term "piano roll" is used to refer to a graphical display of, and means of editing, MIDI note data.
Usually a means of manually editing other aspects of the MIDI data, such as pitch bend or modulation, is also present, although not strictly part of the piano roll itself.
From the mid 1980s, music software started to include grid-based graphical editors inspired by piano rolls, with the two axes representing pitch and time, and the notes displayed as bars on the grid.
MacroMind's MusicWorks (1984) utilized the Macintosh's high resolution WIMP graphical user interface to implement a piano roll-style editor with a keyboard aligned vertically on the left of a grid.
