Looking into piano rolls at work today and it's a fascinating technology
that provided music at a time when Edison's low-fidelity phonograph was
the only other a
lternative to hiring a
musician.
I've never seen one in use, so it seems incredible that piano rolls were in continuous production from 1896 to 2008. I'm familiar with their design though, which can still be seen in the layout of MIDI editing on most digital audio
workstations.
I was surprised to learn on Wikipedia that performances by many great pianists and
composers were recorded using piano roll, including Gustav Mahler,
Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, Sergei Rachmaninoff,
Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, Jelly Roll Morton and
George Gershwin.
