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The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

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Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#81

Post by ballard »

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…

Demoscene encompasses pushing limits of video hardware (mode-x, 3d) and god know how many copper bars than mod trackers (audio), but there's definitively sizable overlap. Heck, keygens allegedly often have some cool shit in them besides serials in the form of demos. Sometimes the UI themselves is reported to be clever.

For the uninitiated, mod tracking is kind of like midi but with either or both synthesized and digitally-sampled instruments played typically by software. A friend in high school in the late 90's ranked near the top 5 globally with a beautiful piece that used like 32 channels, all in software. No help from a GUS with this.

http://artscene.textfiles.com/music/mods/S3M/MODLAND/

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#82

Post by some1else »

Exactly how many voices do these playbacks include? This couold be limited to just 16 simultaneous piano notes. I'd rather hear it played back on a clean sine synth, where it's possible to distinguish individual notes. I like how Black Midi shares some characteristics with Spectral music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_music), but the implementations are in most cases still crude experiments.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#83

Post by daveungerer »

I'm incredibly surprised by the negativity of the comments here. Taking a medium, in this case a piano midi track, and pushing it far beyond its limits, while still resulting in something resembling music, is just about as close to hacking as you can get.

Also, constraints breed creativity, and this is just another example of that.

It's not the type of music I would listen to generally, but insisting that this should be the case completely misses the point of what's interesting about it.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#84

Post by joezydeco »

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…

I'm curious to know what you think about dubstep, then.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#85

Post by algorias »

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…

Interesting that you bring up the demoscene. This music genre shares with it the fact that it takes a platform to its limits in a technically interesting way (just like 4k intros, C64 demos, etc), but in my taste it distinctly lacks aesthetic merit, which is recognized in the scene as an essential component of any good prod.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#86

Post by PavlovsCat »

john61 wrote: post #74
PavlovsCat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ex…

With computer music, the act of composition and the act of playing it are one and the same. It's like writing a piece, having an orchestra play it, then going back to the score sheet and changing something, over and over. Usually at some point time, patience and/or inspiration run out, long before the song is really good -- but that's a limitation of the state of the art(ists), not of music made with computers in general, IMHO.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#87

Post by k-mcgrady »

aimhb wrote: post #56
jerf wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

>> "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."

It doesn't take many notes to make something impossible in practice. On piano 11 notes simultaneously makes it impossible for one person to play and it would probably sound a lot more coherent. The black midi I've listened to doesn't sound bad, but it all sounds quite similar - there isn't much range.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#88

Post by jmmcd »

daveungerer wrote: post #83

I'm incredibly surprised by the negativity of the comments here. Taking a medium, in this case a piano midi track, and pushing it far beyond its limits, while still resulting in something resembling music, is just about as close to hacking as you can get. Also, constraints breed creativity, and this is just another example of that. It's not the type of music I would listen to generally, but insisting that this should…

No surprise -- the people making negative comments here are the same people who said $(your favourite rebellious composer) wasn't music. People who say that are always judged as wrong, in the end.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#89

Post by ajtaylor »

CodeMage wrote: post #28
bryanlarsen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor? 4 well separated simultaneous note groups in a couple of places. That makes it theoretically impossible to play...

Igudesman & Joo have their own way of playing stuff like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w

Pure genius, and funny too! I couldn't resist posting that link on facebook.

Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

#90

Post by the_cat_kittles »

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…

i think its really about the video more than the music
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