I went to play Fujiwara no Mokou's Theme through my Roland Atelier AT-30 [1], but the MIDI file (at 194.4 MB!) is a tad too big to fit on a 3.5" floppy disk.
It's got a pretty decent sequencer, and had no problems playing Circus Galop.
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
61–70 of 180 posts
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get that mindset at all. A lot of the music I listen to is music that is not playable on an analogue instruments without severely butchering it. Ranging from 8-bit chip tunes to much more complex electronic music. Why does that affect the level of communication? To me, the only thing that is different vs a song is that for electronic music the communication is mostly from the composer. But I find that to be t…
A human interpretation of sheet music is a 3 tier soul transformation. Composer - Interpret - Listener. Computer played music has an digital filter that eliminates a lot of soul in between. Music notation is only a recipe for making music. Playing the recipe is not making music.
There are plenty of other artistic mediums that lack a performance aspect. Painting, drawing, literature, photography. Do these mediums also lack soul because they directly connect the composer to the audience, without a third party to interpret? Sure, if a piece of music was written with the intent that it be played by human hands, then it probably won't sound great when played by a computer. But if an artist creates an original piece of music using electronic tools, how is listening to that piece any different than viewing a photograph, a painting, or reading a book? Many people dislike audio books specifically BECAUSE the filter of the narrator colors their interpretation of the author's words. As with reading, one might argue that electronic music better communicates the author's soul to the audience.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the C64 days I programmed my TI99/4A to play Bach. It sounded awful. The interpretation had no soul. Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.
Is soul the imprecision of notes not being perfectly uniform in duration and velocity? That's what your above comment seems to imply. For instance: Consider a recording from a piano played by a human and a computer-generated MIDI file of the same musical piece with included variation/noise in BPM, note duration, velocity, timing etc. This would result in at least single-blind test for `soul' if you were to listen to…
What about a recording versus a live performance? Isn't a MIDI essentially a super-low-resolution digital recording, minus any spatial acoustic noise? Is soul then contained in space, or the presence of those souls present?
Here's an idea for a test: start with a song recorded at 44100Hz (standard CD quality) that has soul. We can debate the actual piece of music, but I'll use "Clap Your Hands" by A Tribe Called Quest in this example. Give a bunch of people a randomly-downsampled version of the song (at 12500Hz, 800Hz, 220Hz, etc), and have them answer a simple question: "Does this have soul?"
The song is 93BPM, or 1.55 beats per second. At a sample rate of 1.55Hz, we're looking at one sample per beat. Let's use a standard 16-step sequencer and say that a MIDIfied approximation is going to have four samples per beat (quarter notes). So, at about 6.2Hz, we've got a recording that has no better resolution than MIDI (potentially even worse).
Ultimately, I guess I agree with you: "soul" is in the ear of the beholder.
(Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything about digital audio.)
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is soul the imprecision of notes not being perfectly uniform in duration and velocity? That's what your above comment seems to imply. For instance: Consider a recording from a piano played by a human and a computer-generated MIDI file of the same musical piece with included variation/noise in BPM, note duration, velocity, timing etc. This would result in at least single-blind test for `soul' if you were to listen to…
No soul, is not imprecision. It is the expression of humans feelings in form of variation of duration, velocity, loudness. For example speed in music is like speed in breathing. You are not breathing with the same speed all the time. It depends on the context. If you are in a hurry you breathe fast and short. If you sigh you breathe deep and slow. An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported…
> Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music.
Music that wasn't written on and for a computer, no. Yet it's perfectly possible to manually craft "variation of duration, velocity, loudness" for every single note of every single instrument -- just not by feeding music in standard musical notation into a sequencer unchanged! I agree that MIDI isn't very sophisticated, but it's hardly the last word of music written on and played back by computers. Just consider how young this all is! I'm pretty sure physical instruments and the songs played on them started out kinda simplicistic, too. And tribal music for example often isn't so much about expression emotion, but putting people into a trance-like state by endless repetition, and techno does that just nicely already. It's not my cup of tea generally, but I get the same out of chip tunes: I don't need sophisticated music, I just need a canvas for my ears and soul to draw on, I can fill in the blanks or dream up harmonies on my own.
> An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported.
True, but also
a.) it doesn't stop there. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if a simple "gridlike" composition makes me sad, happy or gives me goosebumps, that's "soul enough" for me. Even the soul of a simpleton is still a soul :)
b.) the computer enables composer and interpret to be the same person.. and if they so desire, they can put endless amounts of detail and emotion into a piece. Personally I have no doubt that people like Mozart would have been all over computers as an instrument, and the wide range of expression they offer already.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found the result to be a rather monotonous sameyness. The sound of "all the piano keys being smashed" overwhelms everything else about the piece, and the end result is that for all the apparent energy, the end result is really quite boring. Contrasted to its acoustic opposite, chip-tune minimalism, and I'll take chip-tune anyday, even in its "pure" form (limited polyphony, no postprocessing, etc, just as you would…
I appreciate Black MIDI not really as a "cool gimmick" but more as a genre of music. In my opinion, its main function and appeal is to embody music that is still pleasing to the ear, even if it would be impossible in practice. The majority of the pieces linked to in this thread probably aren't the best example of this, but I think Dream Battle ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzy_WrH8v7U ) is quite good in this regar…
It's better, yes. Still not my taste, but less monotonous.
Still, I'm not sure this "genre" has a lot of depths to explore. Their time and their choice, of course.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#66And... a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found the result to be a rather monotonous sameyness. The sound of "all the piano keys being smashed" overwhelms everything else about the piece, and the end result is that for all the apparent energy, the end result is really quite boring. Contrasted to its acoustic opposite, chip-tune minimalism, and I'll take chip-tune anyday, even in its "pure" form (limited polyphony, no postprocessing, etc, just as you would…
I appreciate Black MIDI not really as a "cool gimmick" but more as a genre of music. In my opinion, its main function and appeal is to embody music that is still pleasing to the ear, even if it would be impossible in practice. The majority of the pieces linked to in this thread probably aren't the best example of this, but I think Dream Battle ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzy_WrH8v7U ) is quite good in this regar…
Honestly, I think you can take most of the notes out of there and it will sound better. I'm not saying that it sounds bad, but the influx of keystrokes doesn't do much there sonically and adds some annoying artifacts.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#68[deleted]
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#69The effect is just reminiscent of a very simple FM synth; you start with a sine wave and add another waveform whose cycle starts below the audible spectrum. Start cranking it up, and you don't hear any "pulse" it just takes on a different timbre.
So, by playing a bunch of notes really fast, you just end up with a different kind of buzz.
I'd rather just use a synth. This is like monkeying with waveforms using a step function. Kind of limited.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#70Well, it is definitely interesting. But in this form, I really see no value. I'm only hearing noise in those videos, the noise from the switching on of the note (that slight 'tack') The synthesisers apparently can't handle that amount of notes without some artefacts. And see, they're only adding huge amounts of notes, but no pitch shift and no volume control (apparently) This could be interesting with different (soft…
We do know that more interesting things are certainly possible with many many notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4
I read a fair bit of scifi, and wonder what an alien life form would sound like, trying to pronounce English. This is pretty damn close.