Introduction of Zoltan Janosy
By Zoltán Jánosy
So far I have been watching this list growing without contributing. Now I will introduce myself briefly. Thanks for putting me on the list.
My name is Zoltan Janosy. I'm currently a postgraduate student of the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary. During my undergraduate studies I got involved with reproducing piano rolls. A researcher from the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Janos Macsai, asked me if I would be interested in converting reproducing piano rolls to electronical format, suitable for doing later studies of the recorded performances. I was interested, and finally I wrote my Master's Thesis about computer processing of reproducing piano rolls. At that time we didn't know about anyone doing similar work. The method we used was to scan the rolls with a high-resolution drum-scanner, process the resulting file on a computer (extract the hole position information), then convert the data to MIDI. We had the possibility to experiment with a Yamaha Disklavier as well. Our goal was to get the best possible restoration of the original performance. We focused on the Welte Mignon rolls, for we had access to several hundreds of them at the Museum of the History of Music.
We processed a few rolls with surprizingly good results. We made sound recordings of the performances using the Disklavier. We presented our results at the 1994 February Audio Engineering Society Convention in Amsterdam. This paper is available in electronical format from:
ftp://bme-tel.ttt.bme.hu/pub/incoming/pianorol
See the file readme.txt for more details about the files contained there. There is also a sample MIDI file available, Ernest von Dohnanyi (a famous Hungarian pianist) playing Liszt's (a famous Hungarian-born composer) XIII. (Hungarian) Rhapsody. (I had reports about problems with loading this file into Cakewalk and other sequencers. It should work fine with MasterTracks or Cubase.)
We have good contacts with several European collectors, including Mr. Hans-W. Smitz, who is probably the most knowledgeable authority in the field of the German Welte Mignon reproducing pianos.
Zoltan
-------- (Mr.) Zoltan Janosy <janosy@tsys.hit.bme.hu> ------ #8^) ---------
Technical University of Budapest, Hungary, Department of Telecommunications
Sztoczek u. 2. 308., H-1111 Budapest, t: +36-1-463-2093, f: +36-1-463-3266
[ Editor's Note: As of the time of my editing, the correct URL
[ is actually:
[ ftp://bme-tel.ttt.bme.hu/pub/income/pianorol
{
[ For those of you who don't have a web browser, this is the
[ equivalent of anonymous ftp to bme-tel.ttt.bme.hu
[ ( aka 152.66.87.102 or 152.66.87.162 )
[ The files are in the /pub/income/pianorol directory: [ Mar 23 1994 Zip File aes94rtf.zip 81Kb
[ Mar 29 1994 Zip File aes94txt.zip 16Kb
[ Mar 23 1994 Zip File aes94ww2.zip 70Kb
[ Mar 23 1994 Zip File aes94ww6.zip 70Kb
[ Mar 23 1994 Zip File prolld.zip 29Kb
[ Mar 23 1994 text/plain readme.txt 1Kb
[
[ Jody |
(Message sent Mon 15 May 1995, 19:07:32 GMT, from time zone GMT+0200.) |
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