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The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

thequietus.com

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Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#11

Post by ajlburke »

I had heard about how cool MIDI was, but wasn't blown away until I saw a demo of MAX back in 1992. MAX let you generate and re-wire MIDI signals in real time with a simple but powerful graphical interface (it's still around and now does real-time DSP audio and video processing too).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)

Later that year I got my hands on a synthesizer and a copy of MAX and it became the first 'real' programming that I did. The real-time feedback made it easy to learn and debug, while its graphical nature made it highly prone to actual 'spaghetti code' unless I properly modularized everything. I quickly learned that I was a better programmer than musician - so I set up MAX to 'cybernetically enhance' my own playing.

If it wasn't for MIDI's fairly simple protocol and MAX's powerful tools built around it, I might not even be a programmer today.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#12

Post by npsimons »

th0ma5 wrote: post #5

MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under the strain of other ideas. I've seen some really great early music (1200s?) MIDIs put together by doctorates, and to simulate the early instruments, each note is hand tuned (or perhaps re-tuned using software, I'm not sure). Those instruments were not diatonic. Additionall…

Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to

The opening in "Rhapsody in Blue" is two and a half octaves, and that's jut the first thing that comes to mind. Also, I'm sure there have been some extensions that enable this, but I don't know for sure; the Yamaha DB50XG I had came with sitar, and while I don't recall exactly the demo song included, it seemed like a reasonable facsimile of Ravi Shankar.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#13

Post by blacksmith_tb »

ajlburke wrote: post #11

I had heard about how cool MIDI was, but wasn't blown away until I saw a demo of MAX back in 1992. MAX let you generate and re-wire MIDI signals in real time with a simple but powerful graphical interface (it's still around and now does real-time DSP audio and video processing too). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software) Later that year I got my hands on a synthesizer and a copy of MAX and it became the first 'r…

Not to mention PD, its free cousin:

http://puredata.info/

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#14

Post by troels »

eclipxe wrote: post #2

I can thank MIDI for getting me into programming. I was 6 at the time and just received an awesome, second hand Yamaha keyboard with MIDI out. I spent that summer researching everything I could about connecting this amazing instrument to my 386 PC. From that research came a love of discovery, technology, openness, creation. A love affair with music was the spark that created a love affair with computing and my eventu…

Ah yes. My first major programming adventure was an attempt to write a MIDI-tracker with TP7. As I recall, it actually sort of worked in the end.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#15

Post by ominous_prime »

npsimons wrote: post #12
th0ma5 wrote: post #5

MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under the strain of other ideas. I've seen some really great early music (1200s?) MIDIs put together by doctorates, and to simulate the early instruments, each note is hand tuned (or perhaps re-tuned using software, I'm not sure). Those instruments were not diatonic. Additionall…

Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to The opening in "Rhapsody in Blue" is two and a half octaves, and that's jut the first thing that comes to mind. Also, I'm sure there have been some extensions that enable this, but I don't know for sure; the Yamaha DB50XG I had came with sitar, and while I don't recall exactly the demo song included, it seemed like a reasona…

The opening of "Rhapsody in Blue" contains a glissando, which is comprised if a fast run of the individual notes, not a continuous sweep.

Since midi messages are only 8bits, you have only 127 steps of resolution. Augmenting a note beyond a certain point leads to noticeable quantization of pitch.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#17

Post by [deleted] »

dimastopel wrote: post #8
tjr wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the Commodore Amiga, I listened to MOD files a lot. Didn't have MP3 at the time (I remember how exciting it was when I got my first MP2 encoder!), and a wave file of a whole song took up nearly half of my hard drive. Very impractical.

An the Impulse Tracker (+ the fact that it was developed on asm)! For me Jeffrey Lim was the coolest developer then. Oh, I remember the playback of my first mp3 file with winamp on my 486 DX4 100 with 4mb RAM. I couldn't even move the mouse without getting stammered playback.

[deleted]

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#19

Post by terhechte »

eclipxe wrote: post #2

I can thank MIDI for getting me into programming. I was 6 at the time and just received an awesome, second hand Yamaha keyboard with MIDI out. I spent that summer researching everything I could about connecting this amazing instrument to my 386 PC. From that research came a love of discovery, technology, openness, creation. A love affair with music was the spark that created a love affair with computing and my eventu…

My first soundcard was a GUS Ultrasound, and after that I saved for quite some time to buy an AWS64 Gold. I loved that soundcard, kept it forever. I used it with Scream Tracker 3 and later Impulse Tracker 2. I've never actually left trackers either. To this day I still use Renoise (http://www.renoise.com), a loose FastTracker variant with vsti, rewire, effects, and more. It was so fantastic when I could control my synthesizers over MIDI from a tracker.

Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On

#20

Post by npsimons »

ominous_prime wrote: post #15
npsimons wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to The opening in "Rhapsody in Blue" is two and a half octaves, and that's jut the first thing that comes to mind. Also, I'm sure there have been some extensions that enable this, but I don't know for sure; the Yamaha DB50XG I had came with sitar, and while I don't recall exactly the demo song included, it seemed like a reasona…

The opening of "Rhapsody in Blue" contains a glissando, which is comprised if a fast run of the individual notes, not a continuous sweep. Since midi messages are only 8bits, you have only 127 steps of resolution. Augmenting a note beyond a certain point leads to noticeable quantization of pitch.

Many performances I've heard of "Rhapsody" were essentially a sweep (portamento? the terminology is a bit muddled). But even if it's not possible on the real instrument, or the real instrument doesn't have the range, doesn't mean that limit should be there; I agree with you that limits suck, and it would be nice if someone invented something better than MIDI (and made it popular/standardized).
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