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The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

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Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#71

Post by tesseractive »

jerf wrote: post #65
aimhb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rock started as music most people thought was too simple to be interesting, and so did jazz and a lot of early electronic music. I think it's really premature to write off a music style most people haven't even heard of yet.

Given how much interesting music (IMO) has come from things like serialist classical, I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone finds ways of producing interesting sorts of tone color that are more difficult to achieve via other methods.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#72

Post by dllthomas »

wonderyak wrote: post #29

Frank Zappa was doing something very similar with the Synclavier in the 80s ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synclavier ). He also has a piece called 'The Black Page' due to its density of notes on the page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Page Both together here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOK98q_ILA&list=PL945B5DD750...

Yeah, I was surprised by the lack of a reference to The Black Page in TFA.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#73

Post by [deleted] »

blackhole wrote: post #6

As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can't play. This, however, is just ridiculous. The thing is, it's not at all hard to write a piano piece that's unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you). It doesn't need to be a grotesque fountain of m…

[deleted]

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#74

Post by john61 »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #64
john61 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

The problem lies in the context. If we speak to each other we take human context into account. So does a musical interpret. It is just another medium. Music instead of words. A computer does not understand human context. This has already be proven by Weizenbaum with his program Eliza. If the Computer does not understand emotion, he does not understand how to create music. There is no possibility to formalize music exactly, so that a computer can play it accordingly. I doubt that this will ever be possible because a true artist takes human context into account in his performance. So there is no static formalization of music. The only solution would be that the composer plays live on the computer. But an instrument that can not be played by humans is useless in this situation.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#75

Post by tesseractive »

john61 wrote: post #36
Strilanc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pianos don't have souls, either. Maybe I'd understand your complaint if it was about computer composition of music, but this is just using the computer as an instrument. Would you say flute players can't play music "with soul" because they aren't directly whistling the noises? Why not? How is that qualitatively different from using a computer to play your composition?

Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.

So does that mean that piano music played on an insufficiently fancy piano is soulless as well?

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#76

Post by john61 »

MoosePlissken wrote: post #62
john61 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 create…

A computer can not paint like Leonardo Da Vinci. He can not write like Shakespeare. And he can not play music like Sviatlosav Richter.

A prush, pencil, and musical instrument that can not be used by humans is therefore useless.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#77

Post by john61 »

tesseractive wrote: post #75
john61 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.

So does that mean that piano music played on an insufficiently fancy piano is soulless as well?

I have a Kawai MP10 digital Piano and an old hand made analog Hofmann piano. If I play for example just the last Chord (6 Notes) of Chopin Prelude op. 28/4 on the Hofmann the music goes deep through every nerve. Nothing comparable happens on the Kawai even with very good speakers.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#78

Post by tesseractive »

john61 wrote: post #77
tesseractive wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does that mean that piano music played on an insufficiently fancy piano is soulless as well?

I have a Kawai MP10 digital Piano and an old hand made analog Hofmann piano. If I play for example just the last Chord (6 Notes) of Chopin Prelude op. 28/4 on the Hofmann the music goes deep through every nerve. Nothing comparable happens on the Kawai even with very good speakers.

Are you saying that those 2 data points constitute a spanning set of the possibilities?

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#79

Post by msutherl »

People here with critical perspectives are missing the point. "Where's the value?" The answer is that the people who make this music are not making music for you. They make it more as a personal challenge and/or to one-up their friends.

There's a long history, going back to 80's[1], of artists abusing various computing platforms to write somewhat melodramatic music that pushes the boundaries of both traditional pop songwriting and the computing platforms themselves. This tradition is closer to hacking than it is to pop music in that it follows its own internal logical of oneupmanship and works aren't produced for any audience outside of the "scene" itself. Black MIDI is just another plausible and entertaining development in that context. Probably some kids who got into the scene and wanted to distinguish themselves by doing something new.

It is indeed also in some respects "good music", but at this point it's already so weird that it's not particularly enjoyable to most people. I happen to have been following this sort of music for awhile, since at least the explosion of the chiptune/micromusic scene in the early 00's, and I've learned to enjoy it such that I liked the pieces linked in the article and in this thread. I liked them both as cheesy sentimental pop music and for the "hacks" (e.g. playing a bunch of notes to make a phased "kick" sound) in the same way that someone might appreciate technical guitar playing. Another poster was spot-on when he said that this is basically hacked additive synthesis – that's precisely the joy of it! Ultimately, it's just another acquired taste, like wine or classical music.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#80

Post by msutherl »

msutherl wrote: post #79

People here with critical perspectives are missing the point. "Where's the value?" The answer is that the people who make this music are not making music for you . They make it more as a personal challenge and/or to one-up their friends. There's a long history, going back to 80's[1], of artists abusing various computing platforms to write somewhat melodramatic music that pushes the boundaries of both traditional pop…

Some "scene" music that I actually listen to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GIemGd3Ctk&list=PLkMjO0BRqWu... (FM funk)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl7TjvZzWMY (Zabutom)

Basically just really good 4-part harmony on 8-bit chips. It's really not unlike pre-Rennaisance church music (early polyphony), or a lot of modern choral music.

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