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MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under the strain of
by th0ma5 14y ago
MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under the strain of other ideas.
I've seen some really great early music (1200s?) MIDIs put together by doctorates, and to simulate the early instruments, each note is hand tuned (or perhaps re-tuned using software, I'm not sure). Those instruments were not diatonic.
Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to, it is just that it isn't something MIDI can handle.
There are a lot of compromises and hacks and such. Recently at PyOhio I saw a presentation about the raw data of the Open Goldberg Variations, and some of the raw data from that device has pressure sensitivity readings outside of the scale of MIDI.
Most artists I see wind up using OSC. It is lower level and more general purpose, and you can convert to MIDI (lossy) if you need it. I was thinking of how to sum this up, but I guess MIDI is good for what it is good for, and like most things, aren't much help when you go down a deep rabbit hole. I love MIDI though!
- dbattaglia 14y agoI always wonder if we'll ever see OSC catch on in the way MIDI has by the big name manufacturers (Roland, Korg, etc). You see it in niche interfaces like the Lemur but not much else. Even the Monome devices don't work with OSC natively, they send serial data over USB, you need software to convert it.
- jamesbritt 14y agoI'm surprised to not see OSC being included in even the upcoming version of Ableton Live. This is one reason I prefer Renoise (though it's a somewhat apples to oranges match-up). It has built-in OSC support, and adding custom OSC message handlers via Lua scripting is relatively trivial.
- tibbon 14y agoIs Live removing OSC? That's really unfortunate. I use it with my Monome right now for Live stuff.
- jamesbritt 14y agoRemoving? To my knowledge it was never there. Are you sure Monome is not sending MIDI, or going through some intermediary app (MAX for Live or something similar) or an add-on?
- tibbon 14y agoAh yea, I'm running it all through Max4Live.
- dbattaglia 14y agoWhat kind of Live-Monome apps are you using? Just curious, I have a 64 and 256 myself (I actually was the guy who ported Monome Serial from OSX to Windows, so I'm pretty biased towards Monome devices :) )
- tibbon 14y agoMostly using Stretta's ones. Need to use them more. I'm working this week to get my modular talking to Live in a useful way using the Monome and an Expert Sleepers ES-3 (8 DC coupled outputs that work as trigger, gate or CV out)
- dbattaglia 14y agoYeah it's kind of a bummer but Max4Live really helps mitigate things. Especially as a coder, its pretty cool to just pop up a Max js object and work with the Max4Live API directly in code. I'm a long time Reaktor and Max user, but these days I find the mouse-based box-and-wire interface painful when you want to make something somewhat complicated. I believe Resoise has Lua scripting now no? That seems pretty cool, gotta take a look even though I always find trackers to be somewhat tough to get used to.
- npsimons 14y agoAdditionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to The opening in "Rhapsody in Blue" is two and a half octaves, and that's jut the first thing that comes to mind. Also, I'm sure there have been some extensions that enable this, but I don't know for sure; the Yamaha DB50XG I had came with sitar, and while I don't recall exactly the demo song included, it seemed like a reasonable facsimile of Ravi Shankar.
- ominous_prime 14y agoThe opening of "Rhapsody in Blue" contains a glissando, which is comprised if a fast run of the individual notes, not a continuous sweep. Since midi messages are only 8bits, you have only 127 steps of resolution. Augmenting a note beyond a certain point leads to noticeable quantization of pitch.
- npsimons 14y agoMany performances I've heard of "Rhapsody" were essentially a sweep (portamento? the terminology is a bit muddled). But even if it's not possible on the real instrument, or the real instrument doesn't have the range, doesn't mean that limit should be there; I agree with you that limits suck, and it would be nice if someone invented something better than MIDI (and made it popular/standardized).
- ominous_prime 14y agoTrue, I was thinking of the piano arrangement, but orchestral version is opened by a clarinet, and the player usually combines a glissando and a sizable portamento (and not having much woodwind experience, I have no idea how one would create that slide, like in opening of this classic recording http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U40xBSz6Dc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U40xBSz6Dc)
- chops 14y agoThat kind of slide involves subtly easing off the holes of the clarinet, leaving partial openings. It's a skill I practiced, but never really mastered. I could slide a few notes, but it was never make it that smooth, nor could I slide that many without easing off too quickly and making the slide "jump".
- archagon 14y agoHave you heard of Scala? http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ It's used to change around the default MIDI scale, so that you can play with early scales or even scales from other cultures. It's really cool if you get it working with your keyboard. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of software that supports it, although I think Logic Pro did at some point.
- th0ma5 14y agoHey err, well I may have stumbled upon this before I knew of its importance, but I could also be full of myself :P Regardless, thank you for bringing it!!
- teeja 14y agohow could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? ... it isn't something MIDI can handle. The 14-bit pitchbend command can handle portamento of any range since day one. Assuming you can find a synth that isn't aliasing by the time you get to C8 (good luck), it works just fine.