19 ms·
Black MIDI
- deluxeroyale 4y agoA 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.
- davidthewatson 4y agoSurely you’re referring to the black page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- Sniffnoy 4y agoThe page does link to it?
- davidthewatson 4y agoWhat I see is that the black midi page links to Zappa not to Zappa’s work titled the black page. I’m not sure of the relationship between Zappa and nancarrow?
- Sniffnoy 4y agoIt's at the end of the first paragraph of the "Origins and early history" section.
- virgulino 4y agoRelated, how black MIDI is predated by a classical composer on self-playing pianos: Steampunk black MIDI - The insane music of Conlon Nancarrow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2reuQyLoZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2reuQyLoZM
- mlatu 4y agothanks for this, really interesting
- moomin 4y agoI see Nancarrow is mentioned repeatedly and I highly recommend checking him out. The music is quite compelling.
- j4mie 4y agoBlack Midi is also the name of a rather excellent band: https://bmblackmidi.com/ https://bmblackmidi.com/
- jwhiles 4y agoTheir 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.
- baisq 4y agoIt doesn't seem ungoogleable to me: if you google "black midi" all you find is that band.
- stedaniels 4y agoYou've misinterpreted the comment, this is exactly what they mean. The recent band, has made the term ungoogleable.
- WilTimSon 4y agoYep, 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?
- praptak 4y agoSome (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.
- Rochus 4y ago> 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.
- jsmith99 4y agoThe article says they sometimes play them slowly and speed the recording up to the correct speed afterwards.
- Rochus 4y agoThis would hit physical limits with MIDI 1.x, since you would then have to somehow transpose down the music (to correct for the transpose up because of the much faster playback speed) which would cause a greatly reduced quality (or not work at all) since the frequency range by MIDI expanders and audio equipment was less than 20kHz. And the auditory masikng caused by the ear sets yet another limit.
- mkl 4y agoI think you're misunderstanding. The slow-motion screen recording video can be sped up to match separate non-realtime software synthesis of audio (using e.g. Timidity++). It can all be entirely software so there aren't physical limits to worry about.
- tomashubelbauer 4y agoA sample, very popular composition for anyone who is interested in giving the genre a listen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8vzCHkgEk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8vzCHkgEk
- config_yml 4y agoHere‘s another one from Queen, to give an impression of a more popular song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HjwzR3BqMZ4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HjwzR3BqMZ4
- Nition 4y agoThese are great. They must be abusing note velocity for the "art" sections, right? The melodic parts are obviously being played much more loudly (velocity in MIDI terms) than the beautiful tapestry-like backgrounds. Although I realise a lot of the crazy stuff is also a valid part of the composition (the big blocks of notes emulating drum beats etc).
- olafure 4y agoExcuse me, was it an F or an F# at end of bar 846?
- someweirdperson 4y agoBoth.
- mtremsal 4y agoVery 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 https://youtu.be/55qst4_T_PE
- freemint 4y agoOne 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.
- nathell 4y agoReminds me of John Stump’s “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”, with an insanely hilarious score.
- jmillikin 4y agoLive performance (starts around 3:45): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCgT94A7WgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCgT94A7WgI Amusingly, YouTube is full of videos that claim to be "Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz" but are in fact Marasy's performance[0] of a Cool&Create arrangement of U.N. Owen, which (as mentioned in the article) was the first work to be arranged as Black MIDI. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEQ7XzBnByU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEQ7XzBnByU
- merelysounds 4y agoLoosely 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 https://youtu.be/muCPjK4nGY4?t=8 [2]: https://ledgernote.com/blog/interesting/human-speech-piano/ https://ledgernote.com/blog/interesting/human-speech-piano/
- lioeters 4y agoHow 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 https://ablinger.mur.at/docu11.html#qu3
- MauranKilom 4y agoMore history: https://bedrocksolidmc.wixsite.com/blackmidi/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 https://youtu.be/6P9ISmtWUKI I also enjoy this newer version: https://youtu.be/GCIPZrwOBSU?t=35 https://youtu.be/GCIPZrwOBSU?t=35 Both of them never fail to get a visceral reaction out of me...
- noasaservice 4y agoOr... This more current rendition of Death Waltz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY
- FrozenVoid 4y agoI just binge watched a dozen videos, this is probably my new favorite genre. The complexity and speed are on par with very fast electronic but far more pleasant(like classical orchestra). Are all such Black MIDI using only piano notes or this is just a stylistic convention?
- raptorraver 4y agoThis reminded me of Conlon Nancarrows compositions for player piano. Edit: should have read comments before postin :) It was already mentioned.
- bencollier49 4y agoThis would appear to be a pre-digital example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gVhBxwRqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gVhBxwRqg
- kome 4y agowow! 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
- Floegipoky 4y agoAdam Neely made a really cool black-midi-ish fractal of Coltrane's first recorded Giant Steps solo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J98jwtm5U4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J98jwtm5U4E
- jancsika 4y ago> Though the two are unrelated in origin, the concept of impossible piano existed long before black MIDI, manifesting itself within Conlon Nancarrow's work involving player pianos where he punched holes in piano cards, creating extremely complex musical compositions in the same impossible, unplayable spirit of black MIDI Just did my good deed for the day and changed "piano cards" to "piano rolls." I'm guessing this article was written by a programmer. I have to admit I like the idea of old school programmers filling out punch cards and feeding them into a piano!
- hcs 4y agoI don't think these were used for piano, but there was an organ book music system that used a chain of cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_music Edit: some discussion here https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/did-any-player-pianos-use-card-decks https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/did-any-playe...
- threads2 4y agoDo all black midi songs sound like anime music?
- jancsika 4y agoA 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.
- DonHopkins 4y agoAlso there is "Granular Synthesis": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 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/2013/11/21/listening-to-the-beatles-white-album-100-times-all-at-once/ 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-100 https://soundcloud.com/dustandgrooves/white-album-side-1-x-1...
- dang 4y agoRelated: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546489 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7195283 - Feb 2014 (34 comments) The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640963 - Oct 2013 (175 comments) The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112 - Sept 2013 (5 comments)
- hgomersall 4y agoI 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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o96o-N-nX-I
- dhosek 4y agoIt 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.
- jszymborski 4y agoDoes Rush E count as Black MIDI? https://youtu.be/Qskm9MTz2V4?t=108 https://youtu.be/Qskm9MTz2V4?t=108