3 ms·

> MIDI is an 8-bit standard And considering one of those bits is used for status, it’s effectively 7 bits worth of resolution (128 discrete values is... not gr

> MIDI is an 8-bit standard And considering one of those bits is used for status, it’s effectively 7 bits worth of resolution (128 discrete values is... not great for anything but maybe western scale note pitch values).

TheRealPomax 8y ago
not sure that's useful information to highlight how bad MIDI is, given that you can effectively get any frequency out of a hardware device that supports the coarse+fine channel tuning instructions. It's high time MIDI gets an update, but "I can't get my non-western scale out of this device!" is not one of the problems MIDI 1.0 actually suffers from.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Microtuning is a long way from being a solved problem in MIDI 1.0. MIDI Tuning Standard is sufficiently poorly implemented that there are several non-standard alternatives in widespread use. This is very much a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" type of situation - what western engineers perceive as an insignificant edge case is a constant frustration for many non-western musicians. The answer to the question "How do I play music from my own culture using electronic instruments?" should not be "Well, it's complicated...". Support for non-western scales should not be a clumsy, optional part of the spec. https://www.midi.org/articles/microtuning-and-alternative-intonation-systems https://www.midi.org/articles/microtuning-and-alternative-in...
  - jzoch 8y ago
    Agreed. This reminds me of a few discussions i saw about unicode being silly and over the top and that ascii is perfectly functional. Non english languages can work around the spec!
  - rebolek 8y ago
    Tell how western-centric they were to those Japanese engineers from Yamaha, Roland, Korg and Kawai who worked on MIDI 1.0 specs.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      Japanese traditional music is primarily pentatonic or heptatonic and aligns closely to western 12-tone equal temperament. Contemporary Japanese music is entirely compatible with western music theory. That's a happy coincidence for a Japanese-American project, but it's distinctly inconvenient for Arabic, Persian or Indonesian musicians who use notes that have no useful equivalent in the western scale.
- dbattaglia 8y ago
  Sorry, I don't think I made my point well here. I was trying to say how 128 discrete values is incredibly course grained for a lot of uses, but I should have mentioned that it seems to be worse for Control Change parameters than Note + Velocity. 7 bits maps fairly well to an 88 note western style keyboard a lot better than emulating a potentiometer on an analog filter.

TheRealPomax 8y ago

not sure that's useful information to highlight how bad MIDI is, given that you can effectively get any frequency out of a hardware device that supports the coarse+fine channel tuning instructions. It's high time MIDI gets an update, but "I can't get my non-western scale out of this device!" is not one of the problems MIDI 1.0 actually suffers from.

jdietrich 8y ago
Microtuning is a long way from being a solved problem in MIDI 1.0. MIDI Tuning Standard is sufficiently poorly implemented that there are several non-standard alternatives in widespread use. This is very much a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" type of situation - what western engineers perceive as an insignificant edge case is a constant frustration for many non-western musicians. The answer to the question "How do I play music from my own culture using electronic instruments?" should not be "Well, it's complicated...". Support for non-western scales should not be a clumsy, optional part of the spec. https://www.midi.org/articles/microtuning-and-alternative-intonation-systems https://www.midi.org/articles/microtuning-and-alternative-in...
- jzoch 8y ago
  Agreed. This reminds me of a few discussions i saw about unicode being silly and over the top and that ascii is perfectly functional. Non english languages can work around the spec!
- rebolek 8y ago
  Tell how western-centric they were to those Japanese engineers from Yamaha, Roland, Korg and Kawai who worked on MIDI 1.0 specs.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    Japanese traditional music is primarily pentatonic or heptatonic and aligns closely to western 12-tone equal temperament. Contemporary Japanese music is entirely compatible with western music theory. That's a happy coincidence for a Japanese-American project, but it's distinctly inconvenient for Arabic, Persian or Indonesian musicians who use notes that have no useful equivalent in the western scale.
dbattaglia 8y ago
Sorry, I don't think I made my point well here. I was trying to say how 128 discrete values is incredibly course grained for a lot of uses, but I should have mentioned that it seems to be worse for Control Change parameters than Note + Velocity. 7 bits maps fairly well to an 88 note western style keyboard a lot better than emulating a potentiometer on an analog filter.