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Black MIDI

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Re: Black MIDI

#2
A childhood friend used to compose “Frank Zappa”-like music using some obscure MIDI composing software on windows. I used to watch him randomly spread out thousands of notes on the note sheet, press play and it would just sound bizarre and random, I didn’t get it. I was 13 and the year was 1999.

Re: Black MIDI

#4
I see Nancarrow is mentioned repeatedly and I highly recommend checking him out. The music is quite compelling.

Re: Black MIDI

#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.

Re: Black MIDI

#7

A childhood friend used to compose “Frank Zappa”-like music using some obscure MIDI composing software on windows. I used to watch him randomly spread out thousands of notes on the note sheet, press play and it would just sound bizarre and random, I didn’t get it. I was 13 and the year was 1999.

Surely you’re referring to the black page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Page I was surprised the Wikipedia page didn’t link to it but perhaps Zappa wasn’t big in Japan. It is a historically significant work for its “statistical density” to quote Zappa speaking about the piece.

Re: Black MIDI

#8

A childhood friend used to compose “Frank Zappa”-like music using some obscure MIDI composing software on windows. I used to watch him randomly spread out thousands of notes on the note sheet, press play and it would just sound bizarre and random, I didn’t get it. I was 13 and the year was 1999.

Surely you’re referring to the black page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Page I was surprised the Wikipedia page didn’t link to it but perhaps Zappa wasn’t big in Japan. It is a historically significant work for its “statistical density” to quote Zappa speaking about the piece.

The page does link to it?

Re: Black MIDI

#10
One method how stuff like a 6.5 million note version of tetris is created that multiple people make their own black midi following the melody and then those get combined together. Supprisingly this still sounds very different from white noise.
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