page_title: Piano roll
section_title: Buffalo Convention
hierarchical_section_title: Piano roll / Buffalo Convention
context_page_description: A piano roll is a music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano. Piano rolls, like other music rolls, are continuous rolls of paper with perforations punched into them. The perforations represent note control data. The roll moves over a reading system known as a 'tracker bar' and the playing cycle for each musical note is triggered when a perforation crosses the bar and is read.
  Piano rolls have been in continuous production since at least 1896, and are still being manufactured today; QRS Music offers 45,000 titles with "new titles being added on a regular basis", although they are no longer mass-produced. MIDI files have generally supplanted piano rolls in storing and playing back performance data, accomplishing digitally and electronically what piano rolls do mechanically. MIDI editing software often features the ability to represent the music graphically as a piano roll.
  The first paper rolls were used commercially by Welte & Sons in their orchestrions beginning in 1883.
  A rollography is a listing of piano rolls, especially made by a single performer, analogous to a discography.
context_section_description: The majority of piano rolls play on three distinct musical scales. The 65-note (with a playing range of A1 to C♯7) format was introduced in 1896 in the USA specifically for piano music. In 1900, an American format playing all 88 notes (A0 to C8) of the standard piano scale was introduced. In 1902, a German 72-note scale (F1, G1 to E7) was introduced. All of these scales were subject to being operated by piano rolls of varying dimensions and there was no real industry standard, until the 1908 Buffalo Convention of US manufacturers standardized the US industry to the 88-note scale and fixed the physical dimensions for that scale.
  The Buffalo Convention of December 10, 1908 established two future roll formats for the US-producers of piano rolls for self-playing pianos. The two formats had different punchings of 65 and 88 notes, but the same width (11 ¹⁄₄ inches or 286 millimetres); thus 65-note rolls would be perforated at 6 holes to the inch, and 88-note rolls at 9 holes to the inch, leaving margins at both ends for future developments. This made it possible to play the piano rolls on any self-playing instrument built according to the convention, albeit sometimes with a loss of special functionality.  This format became a loose world standard.
caption: First part of a piano roll for Welte-Mignon, about 1919, with lines for a pianolist, according to the Buffalo Convention
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