The Best Way to Preserve a Collection

Most surviving piano rolls are between ninety and more than one hundred twenty years old. Despite their high-quality paper, age and use have made them fragile, some are damaged, and they can no longer be played safely. Professional digitization is the best way to preserve these valuable originals. Most importantly: you decide how the digital copies we make of your rolls are used.

Thousands of Rolls Already Digitized

We have many years of experience digitizing piano rolls of all types and formats. That experience is essential for handling fragile rolls safely while producing the high-quality digital copies that preservation requires. With the roll owner’s consent, we can use the digital copies to make authentic recuts on request. These can be used safely for demonstrations, sparing the fragile originals. We can also prepare processed image data and audio emulations to your specifications, although this takes considerably more work for each title. For experts in music and performance research, the raw image data is especially valuable, because any further processing already means intervening in the original data on the basis of many assumptions and rules of thumb.

For digitization, we work closely with the Bern University of the Arts (HKB, Switzerland), which kindly provides us with its powerful optical scanner (see picture). It allows us to create precise digital copies that capture both the perforated information on the rolls and image data, including the handwritten markings found on some rolls. We also use our own pneumatic scanner.

We Record Metadata for Every Roll

During digitization, we record important details about each roll in a metadata database, for example roll number, title, composer, pianist, tempo, condition of the roll and its box, special features and notes, weight, length of the perforated section, etc. This provides data that proves very valuable for later research. By comparing it with our catalog information and using other sources, we can add further information.

Going through every roll usually reveals hidden features, too, such as production rolls or handwritten notes on how a roll was made. On some roll types, the tempo and accent information is marked graphically on the roll, so recording it matters. A complete review of the entire collection by trained eyes is also important because, even under good storage conditions, pests or damage from earlier transport or mishandling (e.g. old rubber bands used to hold the roll) sometimes appear, and their effects should be addressed as early as possible.

Working with Experts and Institutions

Our references speak for themselves, and mostly speak well of us. We work closely with universities, institutions and experts around the world and have completed projects with Stanford University, the University of Sydney, Goethe University Frankfurt, the University of Bonn and many others. Numerous museums have used our services, for example the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg, the Museum of Mechanical Musical Instruments in Bruchsal, the Musical Museum in Brentford (UK), the Mahler Museum in Hamburg and many more.

Of course, our piano rolls are also used by numerous institutions, collectors and musicians around the world. Every day we work to preserve the world’s stock of historic piano rolls and to make the wonderful music on them available to as many people as possible. Everything we do is above board: we sign contracts with you that cover every aspect of handling the valuable rolls, insurance and the use of the digital copies. If you are interested in working with us, please get in touch.

Enjoying Music and Inspiring People

For all our fascination with the technology and the many exciting details of piano rolls, it is the music that inspires us most. We want to make this almost limitless repertoire accessible to as many people as possible. In the spirit of the quote sometimes attributed to Gustav Mahler, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the passing on of the flame” (Thomas More, 1478–1535), we regularly appear at events with lectures, demonstrations and pre-concert talks.

There are so many fascinating historical details about the instruments and rolls, the recording and production methods, the composers and pianists and, of course, the pieces themselves. They delight laypeople and experts alike. In February 2024, for example, during a pre-concert talk on Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, we thrilled the audience in Duisburg with the piano reduction of ‘Das himmlische Leben’ recorded by Gustav Mahler himself.