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I haven't had time to watch that video (though I will), but that sounds to me like complaining that the USB HID standard lacks proper support for ametric poetry

by ajross 4y ago

I haven't had time to watch that video (though I will), but that sounds to me like complaining that the USB HID standard lacks proper support for ametric poetry. It's... not for that. Given a standard for how instruments work, MIDI's a reasonably simple event structure to represent them. But the space of "what can you do with an 'instrument' to make music" is immense, and not feasibly susceptible to enumeration in a protocol like this. Music is art, and almost without exception every great musician ends up doing something that can't be represented by the algorithmic conventions of her ancestors. MuseScore has the disadvantage of trying to live in this weird world of "typeset music", which has (for centuries) tried really hard to pretend that this disconnect doesn't exist. But it does, and it's not MIDI's fault any more than it is the fault of whoever invented the drum roll or pizzicato strings or anything else that didn't have a pre-existing notation. Quite frankly MIDI isn't even MuseScore's biggest problem. Just look over the shoulder at any teenager playing with Garage Band with a big cacophany of effects and then ask "how do you put that in MuseScore". You can't, and you never will, and... that's probably a good thing.

ilyt 4y ago
The typeset stuff was invented way before midi tho. Just that MIDI was really invented for electronic instruments and, well, most of them were notes generated by pressing keys and maybe a modulation bar or joystick. Hell, arguably you still could transfer a lot of those modulations via CC commands but you'd have to standarise on which exact CC change corresponds to what instrument's technique. That being said MIDI 1.0 clearly has a bunch of pain points (low resolution, no bidi communication making auto-config hard etc.) that are getting fixed in 2.0 but that just slowly started, so 1.0 is there to stay for a long time still.
- ajross 4y ago
  > The typeset stuff was invented way before midi tho. To be clear: that was the point. Typeset music notation has struggled to keep up with the physical expression of music[1] for hundreds and hundreds of years. There's nothing new about this problem, and it has nothing to do with MIDI. [1] And MIDI is just another such expression in this context. MIDI is absolutely not an attempt to reproduce typeset music, it's designed to capture electronic instrument behavior.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Both typeset music and MIDI is trying to translate expression of the artist into a protocol/notation so I don't think it's unfair to compare the two
djur 4y ago
The video isn't complaining about MIDI. It's just saying that MIDI isn't suitable for MuseScore's specific use case (playing orchestral scores through virtual instruments), and since VST instruments use MIDI as an interface, that problem wasn't immediately solvable. (Their eventual solution was implementing an alternative protocol and a plugin compatible with it.)
coldtea 4y ago
>But the space of "what can you do with an 'instrument' to make music" is immense And the space of "what you can do expression-wise with very commonly used VST and sample libraries and notation packages" is hardly vast, and could very well be covered with MIDI if it has some more very basic capabilities. It doesn't need to cover all the space (like how to express a musical saw performance), and nobody asks for this. They ask for very common problems, everyone in the notation, sountrack, etc. field has, and that sequencers already solve - but in ad-hoc and non-standard ways, or ways that require too much manual intervention. Common people, it's not like a 40 years old, pre computer music format, is the holy grail, and anybody criticizing it for lack of certain features needed today (today? Huh, expressive mode switch in sample VSTs has been a thing for 2+ decades) is akin to implying "USB lacks support for ametric poetry."

by ajross 4y ago

ilyt 4y ago

The typeset stuff was invented way before midi tho. Just that MIDI was really invented for electronic instruments and, well, most of them were notes generated by pressing keys and maybe a modulation bar or joystick. Hell, arguably you still could transfer a lot of those modulations via CC commands but you'd have to standarise on which exact CC change corresponds to what instrument's technique. That being said MIDI 1.0 clearly has a bunch of pain points (low resolution, no bidi communication making auto-config hard etc.) that are getting fixed in 2.0 but that just slowly started, so 1.0 is there to stay for a long time still.

ajross 4y ago
> The typeset stuff was invented way before midi tho. To be clear: that was the point. Typeset music notation has struggled to keep up with the physical expression of music[1] for hundreds and hundreds of years. There's nothing new about this problem, and it has nothing to do with MIDI. [1] And MIDI is just another such expression in this context. MIDI is absolutely not an attempt to reproduce typeset music, it's designed to capture electronic instrument behavior.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Both typeset music and MIDI is trying to translate expression of the artist into a protocol/notation so I don't think it's unfair to compare the two

djur 4y ago

The video isn't complaining about MIDI. It's just saying that MIDI isn't suitable for MuseScore's specific use case (playing orchestral scores through virtual instruments), and since VST instruments use MIDI as an interface, that problem wasn't immediately solvable. (Their eventual solution was implementing an alternative protocol and a plugin compatible with it.)

coldtea 4y ago

>But the space of "what can you do with an 'instrument' to make music" is immense And the space of "what you can do expression-wise with very commonly used VST and sample libraries and notation packages" is hardly vast, and could very well be covered with MIDI if it has some more very basic capabilities. It doesn't need to cover all the space (like how to express a musical saw performance), and nobody asks for this. They ask for very common problems, everyone in the notation, sountrack, etc. field has, and that sequencers already solve - but in ad-hoc and non-standard ways, or ways that require too much manual intervention. Common people, it's not like a 40 years old, pre computer music format, is the holy grail, and anybody criticizing it for lack of certain features needed today (today? Huh, expressive mode switch in sample VSTs has been a thing for 2+ decades) is akin to implying "USB lacks support for ametric poetry."