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Black MIDI

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Re: Black MIDI

#51

Post by jacquesm »

gaudat wrote: post #45
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.

Back when I was a kid I played with some of those black MIDI files. I think one of the tricks is to put the same melody on multiple octaves. It makes the sound fuller without going dissonant. There is also a phase like effect that can be done by playing sgales really quickly. I think I saw that in one of the original Touhou black midi files. And of course there is pressng all 88 keys on the MIDI piano at the same tim…

That would sound like a very quick glissando.

Re: Black MIDI

#52

Post by lgas »

thraxil wrote: post #21
jwhiles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My favorite little band naming micro-trend was bands naming themselves after Python projects, but doubled. Eg, there are bands named "Django Django" and "PyPy".

It's already PyPy, so shouldn't that be "PyPy PyPy"?

Re: Black MIDI

#53

Post by BLanen »

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.

CHVRCHES is the opposite. Spelled wrong intentionally for SEO.

Re: Black MIDI

#54

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Rochus wrote: post #48
mkl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality will be essentially perfect. The wave file is rendered in software, as slowly as it needs to go. The rendering speed has nothing to do with playback speed, sampling rate, or frequency. Think of it like a ray tracer generating a few pixels a second and gradually building up the frames of a movie. You could generate one audio sample per second and save them to a file, and twelve hours or so later you'd have…

I responded to the fellow stating "The article says they sometimes play them slowly and speed the recording up to the correct speed afterwards." which implies a change to the time scale. But also if you do a "perfect" non-realtime offline rendering Black MIDI is pointless; a piano has 88 keys; if you want to play thousands of notes a second then the only "benefit" you get is either a comb filter effect when the same…

The benefit is you can create sample-accurate arpeggios, amplitude-modulated timbres, and other extreme and unplayable effects famously (over)used in tracker music.

You don't seem to have experience of what trackers can do. Essentially Black MIDI is rendered tracker music with a nice animated piano roll background.

On a slow system a render will take longer than real time. On a fast system it won't.

Re: Black MIDI

#55

Post by cwillu »

bskrobisz wrote: post #47
gaudat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I was a kid I played with some of those black MIDI files. I think one of the tricks is to put the same melody on multiple octaves. It makes the sound fuller without going dissonant. There is also a phase like effect that can be done by playing sgales really quickly. I think I saw that in one of the original Touhou black midi files. And of course there is pressng all 88 keys on the MIDI piano at the same tim…

>And of course there is pressng all 88 keys on the MIDI piano at the same time. I would like to know what that sounds like on a real piano though. The mute pedal on an upright/console piano works by situating the hammers closer to the strings; if you stomp on it hard enough, you can get it to jerk all of the hammers such that they actually hit the strings and get this "all 88 keys" noise. I don't recommend this if yo…

Hold the sustain pedal and then drop the lid “by accident”.

Re: Black MIDI

#56

Post by lioeters »

merelysounds wrote: post #20

Loosely related, MIDI standard can be used to generate all kinds of sounds, even human speech on a real life piano. Here's a demonstration from 2009[1] and a recent article with more context [2]. [1]: https://youtu.be/muCPjK4nGY4?t=8 [2]: https://ledgernote.com/blog/interesting/human-speech-piano/

How wonderful, that gave me the feelies. From the artist's website:

> The piano imitates the human voice and at the same time operates as an alienated recording and reproducing device. It has thus been replaced as traditional musical instrument: no artist operates it in order to play music. It becomes an oversized phonograph which is not used for the production of previously composed music but for the reproduction of the human voice. The sudden comprehensibility of single words, whenever the piano becomes the faithful representation of language, equally has the effect of a phantom’s abrupt appearance: the close up reality of the voice is a ghostly apparition – as though the “forbidden” border between dream (music) and reality (language) had been crossed. The “talking” piano represents a mimetic machine which is capable of producing the mimesis of a mimesis: it absorbs, it imitates what has already previously been imitated, namely the recording of sound.

> From: Chico Mello “Mimesis und musikalische Konstruktion”, Shaker Verlag, Aachen 2010

https://ablinger.mur.at/docu11.html#qu3

Re: Black MIDI

#57

Post by Rochus »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #54
Rochus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I responded to the fellow stating "The article says they sometimes play them slowly and speed the recording up to the correct speed afterwards." which implies a change to the time scale. But also if you do a "perfect" non-realtime offline rendering Black MIDI is pointless; a piano has 88 keys; if you want to play thousands of notes a second then the only "benefit" you get is either a comb filter effect when the same…

The benefit is you can create sample-accurate arpeggios, amplitude-modulated timbres, and other extreme and unplayable effects famously (over)used in tracker music. You don't seem to have experience of what trackers can do. Essentially Black MIDI is rendered tracker music with a nice animated piano roll background. On a slow system a render will take longer than real time. On a fast system it won't.

> You don't seem to have experience of what trackers can do.

Well, I'm a trained musician and use sequencers since Atari times; a tracker seems to be just a sequencer more geared towards people who prefer to enter numbers instead of playing; if so I would prefer something like csound or chuck; but I was more interested in live music the last few years; here is what I currently do: http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1153

Re: Black MIDI

#58

Post by galangalalgol »

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…

Would master boot record fall into this genre? I always thought it had too many notes to be legitimate midi.

Re: Black MIDI

#60

Post by kome »

wow! i did that and i had NO IDEA that there was a niche of people doing that as well. i think i found my people i have to get in contact
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