Piano roll

A perforated paper roll that controls a player piano by encoding musical notes and their timing. Holes in the moving paper trigger the piano’s playing mechanism.

Player piano: A piano equipped to play music automatically from a recording or control mechanism. The instrument reads the roll and converts its perforations into played notes.
Musical notation: A system of written symbols for representing music, including pitches, durations, and performance instructions. Roll perforations encode musical events in a different physical form from printed notation.
Barrel organ: A mechanical organ that plays a fixed tune using pins or staples on a rotating barrel. It belongs to an earlier tradition of encoding music in mechanical patterns.
Piano-roll music: Music composed, arranged, or distributed in perforated rolls for player pianos. The roll served as both a playable medium and a format for publishing music.
Player-piano MIDI: A digital control format that represents musical events and can drive compatible player pianos. MIDI stores note events electronically rather than as holes in a paper roll.
Pneumatic system: A system that uses pressurized or moving air to transmit and control force. Many player pianos use changes in airflow through roll perforations to actuate keys.
Pitch (music): The perceived highness or lowness of a musical sound, associated with its frequency. The lateral position of a perforation selects which piano note sounds.
Edwin S. Votey: An American inventor associated with the development of the modern player piano. His Pianola helped popularize a practical piano-playing attachment in the late nineteenth century.
Piano-roll recording: A method of recording piano performance by translating played notes and timing into roll perforations. It allowed a pianist's performance to be reproduced mechanically.
Phonograph record: A disc or cylinder that stores sound as a groove for mechanical playback. A record captures audible sound, while a piano roll encodes instructions for producing notes.

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