Black Midi is also the name of a rather excellent band: https://bmblackmidi.com/
Their KEXP session is very much worth watching!
Black MIDI
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: Black MIDI
#72Earlier 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".
Not sure if whoosh, but Django Django is probably named after Django Reinhardt.
Re: Black MIDI
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's more that their heavy jazz-inspired frenetic playing style is somewhat aligned in spirit with the genre.
Re: Black MIDI
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Is there any software which actually does this properly? I've tried timidity, but it doesn't produce decently sounding output with the black midis I have.
Re: Black MIDI
#75A parallel, secret branch of Black MIDI:
Back in the 80s Trimpin traveled to Mexico City to visit Conlon Nancarrow. He made MIDI files of all of Nancarrow's player piano etudes-- highly complex, mostly dense pieces that consist of multiple melodies that move at different tempos. Nancarrow remarked how chilling it was to see all his piano rolls-- comprising decades of work-- reduced down to MIDI data that I'm guessing was fit onto a single 3.5" disk at that time.
That was a good two decades before the Black MIDI pieces referenced on Wikipedia. Yet AFAICT the wider community has never had access to those MIDI transcriptions. (I happen to have one for Study No. 36 that I made manually from Nancarrow's study score for a paper, but I can't remember where it is.)
So...
1. Nancarrow is listed as a kind of spiritual predecessor of Black MIDI on Wikipedia.
2. Nancarrow is also literally one of the early examples of what became Black MIDI decades later, except nobody knows that because those tiny files that could fit on a 3.5" disk were not (and probably still cannot be) distributed.
3. Copyright is one helluva drug.
Re: Black MIDI
#76More history: https://bedrocksolidmc.wixsite.com/blackmidi/history According to that article, this should be the first Black MIDI composition (also mentioned in the Wikipedia article): https://youtu.be/6P9ISmtWUKI I also enjoy this newer version: https://youtu.be/GCIPZrwOBSU?t=35 Both of them never fail to get a visceral reaction out of me...
Or... This more current rendition of Death Waltz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY
Re: Black MIDI
#77Also there is "Granular Synthesis":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_synthesis
>Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale.
>It is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are split into small pieces of around 1 to 100 ms in duration. These small pieces are called grains. Multiple grains may be layered on top of each other, and may play at different speeds, phases, volume, and frequency, among other parameters.
>At low speeds of playback, the result is a kind of soundscape, often described as a cloud, that is manipulatable in a manner unlike that for natural sound sampling or other synthesis techniques. At high speeds, the result is heard as a note or notes of a novel timbre. By varying the waveform, envelope, duration, spatial position, and density of the grains, many different sounds can be produced.
>Both have been used for musical purposes: as sound effects, raw material for further processing by other synthesis or digital signal processing effects, or as complete musical works in their own right. Conventional effects that can be achieved include amplitude modulation and time stretching. More experimentally, stereo or multichannel scattering, random reordering, disintegration and morphing are possible.
Granular Synthesis EXPLAINED:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftDLRYnRYZQ
As a counterpoint to "Black MIDI", there's also "100 White Albums":
https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/...
>Listening to the Beatles’ ‘White Album’ 100 Times, All at Once
>When the conceptual artist Rutherford Chang presented his idiosyncratic art show “We Buy White Albums” at the Recess Gallery in SoHo in January, he told a visitor that the exhibition was only part of the project. The exhibition seemed plenty, really: Mr. Chang transformed the gallery into a mock record shop in which the only discs on display were copies of “The Beatles” — the 1968 double-disc set popularly known as the “White Album” because of its stark cover.
>Mr. Chang had hundreds of copies, all vinyl LPs, and what fascinated him was the way each aged and the ways their former owners kept them — some pristine, others with drawings, poetry, messages or scrawled names.
>Now, in time for the 45th anniversary of the album’s release on Friday, Mr. Chang has completed the project’s audio component. While listening to each copy of the “White Album” he collected, Mr. Chang made a digital recording. He then overlaid 100 of them, and pressed them as a vinyl set, with a cover on which some of the more colorful examples of former-owner artwork were overlaid as well. He has posted Side 1 on his web page, and said he would sell copies at the WFMU Record Fair, Friday through Sunday.
White Album - Side 1 x 100 - Rutherford Chang & Dust and Grooves:
https://soundcloud.com/dustandgrooves/white-album-side-1-x-1...
Re: Black MIDI
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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”.
Tried it as a kid. The score stand only hit the middle half of the keys though :)
Re: Black MIDI
#79Related:
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546489 - Nov 2015 (119 comments)
I For One Welcome Our New Robot Vocal Cords: Radical Computer Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7195283 - Feb 2014 (34 comments)
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640963 - Oct 2013 (175 comments)
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112 - Sept 2013 (5 comments)
Re: Black MIDI
#80I wondered about this 15 years ago, having never heard of black midi. My thought was around a pianola and what could you do if you used all the notes more frequently. The pondering brought me to Grand Pianola Music by John Adams. A lovely piece, with a different slant. Lots of notes though! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o96o-N-nX-I