Composures have been making "impossible" music for a long time. They just relied on _orchestras_ to play them.
Here's one that does sound pretty great just on piano, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
121–130 of 180 posts
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I do not doubt that.
But to return to the original point, a good instrument has a soul, as a good musician has.
My digital-Kawai does not have one, my analog Hofmann has.
My musical skills have nothing to do with that.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm assuming that since you bring up Rachmaninoff, you know that he reportedly had freakishly large hands, and was in the habit of writing things he could play, but others considered "impossible". To me, that's significantly different than black MIDI, which just seems silly, albeit vaguely amusing.
> large hands Can't they make the piano keys a little smaller (narrower)?
Yup, there's a company that does this, can't google it tho
http://books.google.com/books?id=IbZOJIpgnNwC&printsec=front...
Thing is, players with broad fingers have trouble negotiating between black keys as it is now.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#124I'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…
Actually, no. Using only one instrument is a constraint when it comes to electronic music. Making it extremely unplayable by a human is another constraint.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#125very cool
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a lot of the dislike is from simply not understanding many of the techniques. E.g. in second example, there's a bit where the melody is extremely staccato, but the note length isn't achieved from the keyed duration but by a flurry of other percussive notes overwhelming the compressor/normaliser. I guess without knowing that it might seem uninteresting. If you understand stuff like this you can appreciate the…
I could appreciate it if a person was playing it, but as it is I don't see any reason to be impressed. Anyone with music theory knowledge and the right software could make this. What's the point of cramming notes in if it doesn't take you somewhere. I understand it. I have no appreciation for it. sorry.
Anyone with the right knowledge and right equipment can do basically anything that's possible with that knowledge and equipment. Why be impressed by anything anyone does?
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ye…
We are talking about MIDI sequences that are not producible by humans. If no human can produce those sequences, how can they have human soul?
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If the composer writes music that is not even playable by himself, then this music is never played by a human.
Therefore a soul to soul communication to the listener is impossible.
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#129As a pianist I do not understand the purpose of music that is not playable by humans. In my understanding music is a communication method between human souls. A computer has no soul, likewise Black MIDI "music".
Some of my favorite music is VOCALOID-based (musical speech synthesis), so it doesn't even have a real person singing. And it sure as hell has a lot more "soul" that a lot of the music that's been played by "real instruments" (especially your extremely slim definition).
Re: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
#130I'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.
"People who say that are always judged as wrong, in the end."
By whom?