2 ms·

> Instead of note on / note off, I'm imagining a bidirectional protocol where the controller explicitly allocates voice circuits, explicitly tunes them to a par

> Instead of note on / note off, I'm imagining a bidirectional protocol where the controller explicitly allocates voice circuits, explicitly tunes them to a particular pitch, and then either triggers envelope generators or takes manual control of the envelope. Sounds way more complicated. What makes midi great is how simple Note On and Note Off are. At the end of the day, piano keyboards are just buttons. It’s no different than a qwerty keyboard. Getting the note data should be trivial. The simplicity of the Note On Note Off api is the only reason midi still exists despite the rest of it.

elihu 3y ago
> Sounds way more complicated. Well, sort of. Consider though that a polyphonic synthesizer typically has to internally go to the trouble of allocating a free voice circuit, tuning it to some pitch, and triggering the envelope. What I'm suggesting is making that more explicit in the protocol. In some ways it's simpler because it's closer to how the synthesizer actually works. > What makes midi great is how simple Note On and Note Off are. It is nice that you can get a working MIDI controller or synth up and running with very little effort, but if a thing is too simple then it misses a bunch of nuance and becomes an impediment to more sophisticated use cases. > At the end of the day, piano keyboards are just buttons. It’s no different than a qwerty keyboard. Getting the note data should be trivial. Technically, that's not true. Most MIDI controllers use a double switch mechanism, where the time elapsed between activating the first and second switch tells you have fast the key was pressed. That gets sent as velocity in the NOTE-ON message. Sending high-resulotion pitch data should be fairly trivial as well, it's just that we don't have a standard widely-supported way to do it. (MPE seems to be the current best option.)

elihu 3y ago

> Sounds way more complicated. Well, sort of. Consider though that a polyphonic synthesizer typically has to internally go to the trouble of allocating a free voice circuit, tuning it to some pitch, and triggering the envelope. What I'm suggesting is making that more explicit in the protocol. In some ways it's simpler because it's closer to how the synthesizer actually works. > What makes midi great is how simple Note On and Note Off are. It is nice that you can get a working MIDI controller or synth up and running with very little effort, but if a thing is too simple then it misses a bunch of nuance and becomes an impediment to more sophisticated use cases. > At the end of the day, piano keyboards are just buttons. It’s no different than a qwerty keyboard. Getting the note data should be trivial. Technically, that's not true. Most MIDI controllers use a double switch mechanism, where the time elapsed between activating the first and second switch tells you have fast the key was pressed. That gets sent as velocity in the NOTE-ON message. Sending high-resulotion pitch data should be fairly trivial as well, it's just that we don't have a standard widely-supported way to do it. (MPE seems to be the current best option.)