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Black MIDI

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Re: Black MIDI

#31

Post by sheepdestroyer »

praptak wrote: post #27
Rochus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have bajillions of notes but most of the notes are not audible Good point; and if they would be audible the latency would have been unbearable, since the MIDI 1.x protocol only supports ~31kbit/s; each note requires 3 bytes for on an off each; so e.g. a chord with more than ~20 notes no longer sounds like a chord, but like an arpeggio; many expanders I had were even slower.

I don't believe black midi can be played on normal instruments, it's mostly computer-based (barring the punchcard pianos). In fact even standard pre-black-midi software would probably crash when trying to open such files.

This is a good attempt at playing Rush E (8 hands): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbEBrMZ-G_k

I love the whole arm technique to play the bars xD

The original black midi for comparison : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qskm9MTz2V4

Re: Black MIDI

#32

Post by boppo1 »

jwhiles wrote: post #12
j4mie wrote: post #5

Black Midi is also the name of a rather excellent band: https://bmblackmidi.com/

Their naming is quite inspirational. If I ever start a popular band I will also try to make some existing thing completely un-googleable. The band Franz Ferdinand also tried this and seem to have failed.

Why did they do it?

Re: Black MIDI

#33

Post by ptato »

WilTimSon wrote: post #25
stedaniels wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misinterpreted the comment, this is exactly what they mean. The recent band, has made the term ungoogleable.

Yep, I don't keep up with new music that much anymore but when I saw the title of this post, my mind immediately went to these lads. Perhaps they thought that naming themselves after the genre would prompt more people to discover it but it backfired?

It's more in their style if they just thought it sounded cool.

Re: Black MIDI

#34

Post by Rochus »

praptak wrote: post #27
Rochus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have bajillions of notes but most of the notes are not audible Good point; and if they would be audible the latency would have been unbearable, since the MIDI 1.x protocol only supports ~31kbit/s; each note requires 3 bytes for on an off each; so e.g. a chord with more than ~20 notes no longer sounds like a chord, but like an arpeggio; many expanders I had were even slower.

I don't believe black midi can be played on normal instruments, it's mostly computer-based (barring the punchcard pianos). In fact even standard pre-black-midi software would probably crash when trying to open such files.

A piano has only 88 keys (if you play outside of those it doesn't sound like a piano anymore, even on a computer). And if you use more than one piano at the same time, all what happens is a phasing effect if more than one hits the same note at the "same" time.

Re: Black MIDI

#35

Post by bagpuss »

jwhiles wrote: post #12
j4mie wrote: post #5

Black Midi is also the name of a rather excellent band: https://bmblackmidi.com/

Their naming is quite inspirational. If I ever start a popular band I will also try to make some existing thing completely un-googleable. The band Franz Ferdinand also tried this and seem to have failed.

you mean you haven't heard of "A" or "My Computer"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(band)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Computer_(band)

Re: Black MIDI

#36

Post by alisonatwork »

sheepdestroyer wrote: post #30
praptak wrote: post #6

Some (most?) of the black midi scores do cheat a bit. They have bajillions of notes but most of the notes are not audible. Their presence gives cool visual effects (either static if you decide to print it out as classic music notation or dynamic when an app plays the tune) and that's it. Edit: they typically still have enough audible notes to make it sound like a dozen clones of Chopin played together.

Tau ("the Song with 6.28318 Million Notes") is an extreme example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0gyQMJHQ78 I like the "no arts" version that removes silent notes, as it makes it more enjoyable (for me!) to follow what's happening : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcfmPZVqVtw However, one other interesting aspect of a song like Tau is the "performance" of playing these note-heavy midis. You are effectively record…

Thanks for sharing the "no arts" version, that makes this whole post make a lot more sense to me. It reminds me a lot of the effects we used mod tracker days, where rapidly retriggering a note with a short attack could create a new timbre that fulfilled a different musical role to the original sample. I seem to recall "compos" or challenges in the scene where a restriction might be to create a whole song with just one sample (or even just one channel), so you'd make heavy use of effects like retriggers, arpeggios, tremelos and pitch bends to try create something interesting.

It's fun when you hear the effect in commercial music too. For a while it only really showed up in stuff by IDM producers trying to sound weird, but then it got more mainstream and nowadays you hear it in everything from techno to dubstep and even pop.

I wonder if these black MIDI artists require a specific sample set to be used for playback, so they can control how the waveforms interact. I also wonder how much they use velocity, aftertouch, modwheel etc to shape the sound, or if (for example) the percussive effects are just a result of careful stacking.

Re: Black MIDI

#37

Post by mkl »

Rochus wrote: post #28
jsmith99 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says they sometimes play them slowly and speed the recording up to the correct speed afterwards.

This would hit physical limits with MIDI 1.x, since you would then have to somehow transpose down the music (to correct for the transpose up because of the much faster playback speed) which would cause a greatly reduced quality (or not work at all) since the frequency range by MIDI expanders and audio equipment was less than 20kHz. And the auditory masikng caused by the ear sets yet another limit.

I think you're misunderstanding. The slow-motion screen recording video can be sped up to match separate non-realtime software synthesis of audio (using e.g. Timidity++). It can all be entirely software so there aren't physical limits to worry about.

Re: Black MIDI

#38

Post by Rochus »

mkl wrote: post #37
Rochus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would hit physical limits with MIDI 1.x, since you would then have to somehow transpose down the music (to correct for the transpose up because of the much faster playback speed) which would cause a greatly reduced quality (or not work at all) since the frequency range by MIDI expanders and audio equipment was less than 20kHz. And the auditory masikng caused by the ear sets yet another limit.

I think you're misunderstanding. The slow-motion screen recording video can be sped up to match separate non-realtime software synthesis of audio (using e.g. Timidity++). It can all be entirely software so there aren't physical limits to worry about.

Try to do that with a factor of e.g. 10 (you would likely need a factor of 1000 to cope with a "composition" of millions of notes) and observe the quality. The "physical limits" (e.g. Nyquist rate) also apply to the calculations done by a computer. To cope with the speed-up of slow motion to real-time you'd have to re-sample or transpose. Even with a very large sampling rate both of these transformations only produce useful results within narrow limits (less than an octave, i.e. factor two).

Re: Black MIDI

#39

Post by Rochus »

sheepdestroyer wrote: post #30
praptak wrote: post #6

Some (most?) of the black midi scores do cheat a bit. They have bajillions of notes but most of the notes are not audible. Their presence gives cool visual effects (either static if you decide to print it out as classic music notation or dynamic when an app plays the tune) and that's it. Edit: they typically still have enough audible notes to make it sound like a dozen clones of Chopin played together.

Tau ("the Song with 6.28318 Million Notes") is an extreme example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0gyQMJHQ78 I like the "no arts" version that removes silent notes, as it makes it more enjoyable (for me!) to follow what's happening : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcfmPZVqVtw However, one other interesting aspect of a song like Tau is the "performance" of playing these note-heavy midis. You are effectively record…

> This implies that for a good portion of black midi history, it was not possible for most computers to play those files without screen freezes, heavy skipping notes, and then recovering after the hard portion has passed.

Right. And this still applies today. And anyway: I bet > 98% of all listeners would not notice the difference between 6 millions or only 1000 notes, even when the system was capable of playing every specified note. The whole thing is just a crazy gimmick with no practical use.

Re: Black MIDI

#40

Post by FrozenVoid »

I just binge watched a dozen videos, this is probably my new favorite genre. The complexity and speed are on par with very fast electronic but far more pleasant(like classical orchestra). Are all such Black MIDI using only piano notes or this is just a stylistic convention?
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