Historic Piano Roll Preservation

Julie Johnson, Owner of American Slide Chart in Carol Stream, Illinois, has an usual hobby — collecting music boxes and antique player pianos. As a result of this hobby, Julie's avocation has become collecting and digitally preserving old piano rolls, as well as using the old rolls to punch new rolls to be used in reconditioned player pianos.

The piano rolls are 15 inches to 18 inches wide and can be as long as 200 to 225 feet long. Julie asked IDEAL to help find a way to scan the rolls in one continuous file that can be opened, viewed, and cleaned up.

Contract Work, Scope, and Deliverables

Julie sent IDEAL a piano roll for a trial scan. IDEAL successfully scanned the roll using RasterID and a Chameleon 25" scanner. The file was saved as a tif file and RasterID was used to clean up the file. Julie subsequently purchased a 25" Chameleon and RasterID from IDEAL, and has been busy scanning piano rolls.

Many of the piano rolls are old, dating back to the 1800's, and the paper is brittle and torn. The feed-mechanism on the Chameleon scanner handles the fragile rolls very well. The piano rolls are often on white paper, so Julie has fitted the scanner with a piece of black film that enables the scanner to see the holes on the piano rolls as black dots.

The Chameleon scanner makes it easy to adjust the contrast for maximum visibility. A typical piano roll is about 140'-150' long, and can be scanned in about 15 minutes with RasterID and the Chameleon scanner.

In addition, Julie added some simple guides to the scanner to guide the rolls through.

Once the rolls are scanned, the very large tif image is opened in RasterID for clean-up. The RasterID functions that are used most frequently are "deskew," "erase" and despeckle."

IDEAL was the only company that was able to provide a solution that would enable Julie to work with the large files created with the continuous scan of rolls ranging from 140' to 225'.

The cleaned tif images are fed into a custom-written software program that follows the columns of dots and manipulates the data to keep the columns true and that records where the hole starts and where it stops. It then translates the linear information, i.e., where the roll starts and stops.

This new file is saved and fed into the perforation machine that perforates the new piano roll.

In this way old piano rolls, are preserved in digital form and recreated for modern use.

IDEAL provided on-line training to get Julie started with the RasterID software.

Experience Summary

• Scanning
• Raster Editing
• Training