5 ms·

The idea of MIDI is that you can grab any midi controller and any synthesizer manufactured in the last forty years, plug them together, and they just work. (As

by elihu 3y ago

The idea of MIDI is that you can grab any midi controller and any synthesizer manufactured in the last forty years, plug them together, and they just work. (As long as we can keep up the pretense that we're synthesizing something that behaves like a piano, and we aren't trying to use USB which introduces its own set of problems.) The idea of OSC is that you can send any kind of message at all from any device to any other device and the semantics of those messages are left as an exercise to the reader. There's no guarantee of interoperability. It's just assumed that if you're using OSC you know what you're doing and it's up to you to make sure both devices are speaking the same dialect. Sometimes people tunnel what is effectively MIDI over OSC, but I think that's the closest thing to a common standard, beyond the basic low-level data layout that OSC messages are expected to conform to. I think some people use OSC for various things, but it tends to be for custom bespoke installations that were designed to do something specific.

jojobas 3y ago
"Behaves like a piano" doesn't do it justice. Piano never had channel/note aftertouch, pitch bends or whatever you assign to the 128 arbitrary controllers.
- rvense 3y ago
  The only "piano-related" limitations of MIDI that I've run into is that a) a note-on message is fixed at just three numbers (note, velocity, channel), so while I can map velocity to, say, a filter and envelope settings but I can't easily have independent per-note control of them. It doesn't come up that often, but sometimes I do end up with two slight tweaks of the same patch on two channels and it's a bit of a faff compared to just having more numbers per note event. b) there is poor support for sending articulation (ie., a number that changes without sending a new note-on event) that references a held note, because CCs refer to a channel, not an existing note. Poly AT but isn't universally supported and at least if you're using hardware it tends to hog bandwidth.
  - elihu 3y ago
    Some more piano-like limitations: The tuning is assumed to be 12-tone equal temperament. Other temperaments are possible, but you're kind of off in uncharted territory. Especially if you want a temperament that doesn't use a 12 note repeating octave. (MTS exists but it's not widely supported.) You can't play a unison without resorting to multiple channels. No way to do the equivalent of guitar hammer-ons and pull-offs in a polyphonic manner without resorting to multiple channels. (MIDI 2.0 at least adds per-note pitch bend.) (A lot of MIDI limitations can be gotten around by just using multiple monophonic channels instead of one polyphonic channel, and that's what MPE is. Sadly most of the otherwise amazing famous analog poly synths out there can only receive on one channel.)
    - jojobas 3y ago
      There are system-exclusive commands and reserved/undefined event codes for rare situations like that. (Apart from non-12-note systems, and it's kinda bizarre to expect everyone's music standard to cater for something that esoteric).
      - yrro 3y ago
        This stuff is not esoteric outside of the world of mainstream western music.
        jojobas 3y ago
        The 12-tone system captures most small natural number ratios and, as such, covers most non-western note systems as well (allowing for temperament differences). It's safe to say that less than 0.1% of all music and all composers or performers ever used anything else, and they wouldn't be using synthesizers for that task.
        elihu 3y ago
        > "The 12-tone system captures most small natural number ratios" Notably absent are any ratios that involve a power of 7, and ratios that involve a power of 5 are noticeably out of tune. > "and, as such, covers most non-western note systems as well (allowing for temperament differences)." Temperament differences are pretty significant. > "It's safe to say that less than 0.1% of all music and all composers or performers ever used anything else" I don't know how many composers and performers are interested in carnotic music, Indonesian gamelan, traditional Turkish music, western music as practiced more than a couple hundred years ago, barbershop harmony, lap steel, slide guitar, Appalachian dulcimer, and so on but I think 0.1% is very much an under-count. Even if you're 100% focused on mainstream western music, guitarists will do things like tune their G string 15 cents flat or so because it sounds better for some chords. (I haven't tried that one. I prefer to just replace the fingerboard, re-arranging all the frets so I can play guitar in proper just intonation.) > "and they wouldn't be using synthesizers for that task." Well, that's the problem right there. Synthesizers should be the first choice for microtonal music, not the last one. There's no technical reason for synthesizers to be biased towards 12-EDO or any other specific tuning, it's just a historical accident that the protocol we use is one that wasn't designed with any other use case in mind.
bandrami 3y ago
Carla (and maybe Cabbage?) uses it for control messages but there's the problem that it only works if you've got a big single host running a lot of subject plugins; the idea was supposed to be that your sequencer would send midi to your sampler and your tracker would send control messages to your sampler over OSC and all three of these would be peer programs. There's not a particular technical reason it doesn't work it's just that very few programmers built software to take advantage of it.

by elihu 3y ago

jojobas 3y ago

"Behaves like a piano" doesn't do it justice. Piano never had channel/note aftertouch, pitch bends or whatever you assign to the 128 arbitrary controllers.

rvense 3y ago
The only "piano-related" limitations of MIDI that I've run into is that a) a note-on message is fixed at just three numbers (note, velocity, channel), so while I can map velocity to, say, a filter and envelope settings but I can't easily have independent per-note control of them. It doesn't come up that often, but sometimes I do end up with two slight tweaks of the same patch on two channels and it's a bit of a faff compared to just having more numbers per note event. b) there is poor support for sending articulation (ie., a number that changes without sending a new note-on event) that references a held note, because CCs refer to a channel, not an existing note. Poly AT but isn't universally supported and at least if you're using hardware it tends to hog bandwidth.
- elihu 3y ago
  Some more piano-like limitations: The tuning is assumed to be 12-tone equal temperament. Other temperaments are possible, but you're kind of off in uncharted territory. Especially if you want a temperament that doesn't use a 12 note repeating octave. (MTS exists but it's not widely supported.) You can't play a unison without resorting to multiple channels. No way to do the equivalent of guitar hammer-ons and pull-offs in a polyphonic manner without resorting to multiple channels. (MIDI 2.0 at least adds per-note pitch bend.) (A lot of MIDI limitations can be gotten around by just using multiple monophonic channels instead of one polyphonic channel, and that's what MPE is. Sadly most of the otherwise amazing famous analog poly synths out there can only receive on one channel.)
  - jojobas 3y ago
    There are system-exclusive commands and reserved/undefined event codes for rare situations like that. (Apart from non-12-note systems, and it's kinda bizarre to expect everyone's music standard to cater for something that esoteric).
    - yrro 3y ago
      This stuff is not esoteric outside of the world of mainstream western music.
      - jojobas 3y ago
        The 12-tone system captures most small natural number ratios and, as such, covers most non-western note systems as well (allowing for temperament differences). It's safe to say that less than 0.1% of all music and all composers or performers ever used anything else, and they wouldn't be using synthesizers for that task.
        elihu 3y ago
        > "The 12-tone system captures most small natural number ratios" Notably absent are any ratios that involve a power of 7, and ratios that involve a power of 5 are noticeably out of tune. > "and, as such, covers most non-western note systems as well (allowing for temperament differences)." Temperament differences are pretty significant. > "It's safe to say that less than 0.1% of all music and all composers or performers ever used anything else" I don't know how many composers and performers are interested in carnotic music, Indonesian gamelan, traditional Turkish music, western music as practiced more than a couple hundred years ago, barbershop harmony, lap steel, slide guitar, Appalachian dulcimer, and so on but I think 0.1% is very much an under-count. Even if you're 100% focused on mainstream western music, guitarists will do things like tune their G string 15 cents flat or so because it sounds better for some chords. (I haven't tried that one. I prefer to just replace the fingerboard, re-arranging all the frets so I can play guitar in proper just intonation.) > "and they wouldn't be using synthesizers for that task." Well, that's the problem right there. Synthesizers should be the first choice for microtonal music, not the last one. There's no technical reason for synthesizers to be biased towards 12-EDO or any other specific tuning, it's just a historical accident that the protocol we use is one that wasn't designed with any other use case in mind.

bandrami 3y ago

Carla (and maybe Cabbage?) uses it for control messages but there's the problem that it only works if you've got a big single host running a lot of subject plugins; the idea was supposed to be that your sequencer would send midi to your sampler and your tracker would send control messages to your sampler over OSC and all three of these would be peer programs. There's not a particular technical reason it doesn't work it's just that very few programmers built software to take advantage of it.