These style of music would make an awesome soundtrack to bullet hell style games. Here's a mashup of a bullet hell playthrough with a black MIDI: http://videodoubler.com/combo/saved/464
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
111–120 of 180 posts
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bad musicians frequently blame the instruments.
You mean good musicians do not distinguish good and bad instruments?
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gen…
No it is not. There is no orchestra.
There is an context less, static description of tones, called sheet music or MIDI.
These description gets transformed to music whenever a musician plays it or to a set of soulless notes if a computer plays it.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#114I'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…
Actually, this is kind of the opposite of constraint breeding creativity. You have removed the constraint of having to make a piece of music playable by a human and now you might have a 20 million note song not because it sounds good but just for the novelty of having so many notes. Like any other medium for art, there will of course be good and bad pieces created. But a million old-school geocities web pages w/ auto…
...there will of course be good and bad pieces created.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkyGQnZNLYY&feature=related
Delivered :)
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#115Earlier 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.
You're making the fundamental mistake that all notes that are written down are the same. A midi-file isn't a score, it's a recording of the playback of notes. A performer can sit down at a midi enabled Steinway Grand and record their performance into a midi file, then they can play back that exact performance on the same piano and it will sound identical to the original. If you were to listen to such a playback with…
The OP mentioned MIDI music that is not playable by humans.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#116This is pretty interesting. Reminds me of the "speaking piano" a little bit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad musicians frequently blame the instruments.
You mean good musicians do not distinguish good and bad instruments?
A good musician can play world class music on a rusty spoon, a used pie plate and a one-string-out-of-tune-$20-guitar.
Crap musicians are those that rely on fancy instruments to make up for their lack of basic musicianship.
Even a drunk martini bar pianist can sound halfway decent on a $70k Steinway or Bösendorfer.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making the fundamental mistake that all notes that are written down are the same. A midi-file isn't a score, it's a recording of the playback of notes. A performer can sit down at a midi enabled Steinway Grand and record their performance into a midi file, then they can play back that exact performance on the same piano and it will sound identical to the original. If you were to listen to such a playback with…
The OP mentioned MIDI music that is not playable by humans.
So? It doesn't mean the composer can't write music that exceeds the ability of any human performer and still encode the nuance they intended into the performance.
Just because I can't humanly play Paganini's Caprices doesn't mean it's bad music.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#119Back in the 1930s and 40s, the term "Musique Concrete" would apply to this genre. Back then, "Musique Concrete" was making music via recording technology that could not be played live.
Unplayable music is not new. Some better-known examples are how Queen used to just step off-stage in the middle of Bohemian Rhapsody and play the tape of the mutli-tracked vocals; or how The Who used to screw up on stage playing along with the taped parts of Quadraphonia. Even the Beatles' live performances of Paperback Writer were weak because they used so much multitracking in the studio.
What I found interesting was that many of the multi-note combinations were just hacking the synthesizer to produce different sounds. A talented keyboardist could program MIDI sequences triggered by a single keypress and perform some aspects of "Black MIDI" live.
In contrast, I didn't think that the two examples were pleasing to listen to.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gen…
No it is not. There is no orchestra. There is an context less, static description of tones, called sheet music or MIDI. These description gets transformed to music whenever a musician plays it or to a set of soulless notes if a computer plays it.
As I said already, MIDI is kind of crude and hardly the last word. The description can be as detailed as the brain of the composer can handle it. The acts of composition and performance are indistinguishable. You could even manually set the amplitude of 44100 (or more) points per second if you wanted to... arguably the musicians that can make full use of the possibilities that exist even now haven't even been born yet.
Someone else made a very good point about paintings, and you kind of missed it by saying computers can't paint like Da Vinci or Shakespeare -- of course they can't, just like a brush or a pencil can't, and just like a piano can't compose. Do reprints of Shakespeare's work have soul in your opinion? And do they have more, less, or just as much soul than exact reproductions of his original handwriting? Is it possible to communicate soul by typing as we do right now, or would we have to see and smell the hands doing the typing for that, and heads pausing in reflection? Can a photo made with a DSLR and tweaked in a RAW converter have soul? Can a big format analogue photograph? What resolution does soul have, what resolution does our perception of it have? If facial expressions convey soul, does imperfection of sight reduce the amount of soul being communicated? Why does a piano piece that can move one human deeply leave another completely cold? Why can a landscape, even one devoid of plants and animals, make the soul sing, why does soul get perceived where none was put into? If it's because God created it, how does this not apply to computers as well? So many questions ^^