Geelvinck Pianola Museum

The Geelvinck Pianola Museum occupies a former police station at Westerstraat one hundred and six. You can distinguish this building from its neighbors by the mechanical melodies that occasionally spill onto the street, marking it as a repository for about fifty self-playing pianos and over thirty thousand perforated paper music rolls. Founded in nineteen eighty-one by Theo de Boer and Kasper Janse, this collection highlights the technology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when pianolas allowed listeners to experience complex compositions through instruments that functioned using air pressure and pre-programmed paper scrolls.