3 ms·

> 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 th

• jsmith99 4y ago
  The article says they sometimes play them slowly and speed the recording up to the correct speed afterwards.
  • Rochus 4y ago
    This 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 ago
      I 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.
      • Rochus 4y ago
        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 useful results within narrow limits (less than an octave, i.e. factor two).
        • mkl 4y ago
          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 a 1-second long piece of 44.1kHz audio. There is no speeding up or resampling or transposition involved because the audio file was generated with the right sample rate (nothing to do with the generation/calculation rate).
          • Rochus 4y ago
            I responded to the fellow stating "The article says they sometimes play them slowly and speed the recording up to the correct speed afterwards." which implies a change to the time scale. But also if you do a "perfect" non-realtime offline rendering Black MIDI is pointless; a piano has 88 keys; if you want to play thousands of notes a second then the only "benefit" you get is either a comb filter effect when the same note is triggered nearly the same time or a 3 dB gain (on maximum) if triggered exactly at the same time; there are easier ways to achieve this, even in real-time.
            • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
              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.
              • Rochus 4y ago
                > 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 http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1153
• praptak 4y ago
  I don't believe black midi can be played on normal instruments, it's mostly computer-based (barring the punchcard pianos). In fact even standard pre-black-midi software would probably crash when trying to open such files.
  • sheepdestroyer 4y ago
    This is a good attempt at playing Rush E (8 hands): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbEBrMZ-G_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbEBrMZ-G_k I love the whole arm technique to play the bars xD The original black midi for comparison : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qskm9MTz2V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qskm9MTz2V4
  • Rochus 4y ago
    A piano has only 88 keys (if you play outside of those it doesn't sound like a piano anymore, even on a computer). And if you use more than one piano at the same time, all what happens is a phasing effect if more than one hits the same note at the "same" time.
    • lewispollard 4y ago
      The point is that if the MIDI file and the synthesiser in question are all on the same system (i.e. a VST in a DAW), no MIDI data transfer has to take place. So the data transfer limit in question isn't applicable.
      • Rochus 4y ago
        Even if it's on the same system your piano still has 88 keys and you get either a loudness gain per key or a phasing effect when a key is played more than once per time. The only somewhat interesting effect (at least for some) might be that the generator hits its limits (usually 20 to 40 notes polyphony) and randomly decides which notes to leave out or prioritize. But this is out of control of the "composer" and likely not the intended effect.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
• tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  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.