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Black MIDI

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Re: Black MIDI

#81

Post by klipt »

Rochus wrote: post #39
sheepdestroyer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a work of art like any other. It has Tau*million notes and was released on Tau day. There are other references to Tau scattered throughout the video.

Re: Black MIDI

#82

Post by tenebrisalietum »

Rochus wrote: post #24
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.

> 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.

It gets worse when you throw "controllers" in there, which will generate many MIDI events per second to model the twisting of a knob or movement of a slider.

Re: Black MIDI

#83

Post by mtremsal »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #9

A sample, very popular composition for anyone who is interested in giving the genre a listen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8vzCHkgEk

Very cool! This reminds me of people trying to play Touhou songs on piano. I think the famous one was “Owen Was Her” (sp?).

edit: found this one https://youtu.be/55qst4_T_PE

Re: Black MIDI

#84

Post by dhosek »

It kind of reminds me of how with the band that I was playing in back in the 90s, I was recording each take of each part into a separate track rather than using the DAW’s takes feature because the latter made the number of takes a bit obscure and it was hard to pick and choose bits and pieces of different takes for the final edit. At one point, I (accidentally?) played back all the takes of all the parts simultaneously. It was a delightful effect. I don’t think we had more than three or four version of each part but those combined made it sound like there was a marching band playing the music.

Re: Black MIDI

#85

Post by mhb »

Rochus wrote: post #57
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks. Why one white shoe?

Re: Black MIDI

#87

Post by Rochus »

mhb wrote: post #85
Rochus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Thanks. Why one white shoe?

The white shoes are padded gym shoes to avoid hematomas.

Re: Black MIDI

#88

Post by joveian »

galangalalgol wrote: post #58
sheepdestroyer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wondered about that too once you mentioned it and remembered that he recently mentioned that he live streams his compositions on YouTube, although in private videos, and that he made a few public but unlisted with a list on his server. I'm not sure he wants the list easily searchable but if you follow him on Bandcamp and scroll down to June 15th, 2022, there is a link:

https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/community

I looked for a bit and no, although he does use a lot of short notes. Most of the complexity is in the samples (which I guess is the usual way :) ). Or the instruments I should say, I'm guessing those are primarily sample based. He uses Cubase 8, Massive VST, and Superior Drummer 3.

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