Stanford University Piano Roll Archive
This repository contains MIDI files extracted from scans of piano rolls collected by the Stanford Libraries, a majority coming from the Condon Collection. The SUPRA website contains links to the original scans of the rolls in the Libraries' digital repository, and this repository collects the individual MIDI files of notes extracted from each scan. Renderings of the expression MIDI files into audio recordings are also available. These can currently be listened to on the SUPRA website, and are downloadable at Stanford Digital Repository.
If using this dataset, please cite the following paper:
Zhengshan Shi, Craig Stuart Sapp, Kumaran Arul, Jerry McBride, Julius O. Smith III. SUPRA: Digitizing the Stanford University Piano Roll Archive. In Proceedings of the 20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), pages 517-523, Delft, The Netherlands, 2019.
@INPROCEEDINGS{supra2019,
TITLE={SUPRA: Digitizing the Stanford University Piano Roll Archive.},
AUTHOR={Shi, Zhengshan and Sapp, Craig Stuart and Arul, Kumaran and McBride, Jerry and Smith, Julius O.},
BOOKTITLE={Proceedings of the 20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval},
address={Delft, The Netherlands},
pages={517-523},
year={2019},
}MIDI files are organized into directories based on the format of
the roll (which type of piano the original roll is compatible with).
Currently only the earliest Welte-Mignon rolls are available in the
welte-red directory, meaning "red-colored paper" Welte-Mignon
rolls, or more specifically T-100 WM rolls, since there are 100
tracker bar holes on the pianos that play these rolls.
There are two types of MIDI files in the repository: midi-raw and midi-exp.
"raw" MIDI files, which contain MIDI notes that represent holes in the original scan. There are usually multiple holes representing each musical note. The raw MIDI files also represent the expression holes (dynamics and pedaling) as audible notes. The raw MIDI files are not intended for listening, although it is interesting to listen to the machine-gun version of the music that is produced. The automatically identified note attacks are played loudly, while the hole-notes that should be merged with the attacks are played quietly to give an approximate impression of the music that is contained on the roll. No dynamics are otherwise given to the notes (see the expression MIDI files below). The raw MIDI files are suitable for (1) projects that want to implement their own expressive MIDI files, and (2) audio-to-image alignment applications. Software to generate these MIDI files is available in this repository.
"expression" MIDI files, which have interpreted loudnesses applied to notes based on the expression tracks on each side of the original piano roll. The expression MIDI files take the expression holes from the raw MIDI files and convert them into note attacks velocities, as well as generate sustain and soft pedaling. Notes representing the expression holes are removed from the final expression MIDI file. This sort of MIDI file is suitable for listening and playback as well as for computational performance analysis. Software to generate these MIDI files from the raw ones is available at this repository.
Here is a schematic
of the productions of the MIDI files:
For audio rendering of the expression MIDI files, it was necessary for us to convert the files into type-0 MIDI files with the tempo changes emulating roll acceleration converted into tick values. For projects needing similar accuracy, the type0 utility program can be used to generate the type-0 MIDI file from the expression MIDI file.
For the best listening experience you should listen to the audio renderings of the expression MIDI files that are found on the SUPRA website. These audio files were rendered using the Ivory Keys II software synthesizer.
For questions about the pianoroll data, please email pianoroll_dataset:cyclone:lists.stanford.edu.