17 ms·
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI
- holri 13y agoAs a pianist I do not understand the purpose of music that is not playable by humans. In my understanding music is a communication method between human souls. A computer has no soul, likewise Black MIDI "music".
- owenmarshall 13y agoInteresting take. What's your impression of Musique concrète or - possibly the furthest out - someone like Cage?
- secoif 13y agohttp://www.thefreedictionary.com/close-minded http://www.thefreedictionary.com/close-minded
- bradleyland 13y agoIf music is communication that originates in your soul, then your hands are merely a tool for realizing that expression. Why can't music realized through other means have soul? Arguably, more complex tools allow for greater expressiveness.
- cdcarter 13y agoGo see a Nicolas Jaar concert, or any other incredible electronic musician, and then please tell me again that electronic music has no soul.
- mrgoldenbrown 13y agoThis music is "playable by humans." Their instrument is a MIDI sequencer rather than a piano or guitar. Are you claiming that only X, Y and Z physical artifacts can make real music? Do player pianos make music? Does my MP3 player output music? Maybe I'm unsophisticated, but plenty of 'music' that comes out of my MP3 player generates the kind of emotion that I think of when you say "communication between souls".
- Strilanc 13y agoPianos don't have souls, either. Maybe I'd understand your complaint if it was about computer composition of music, but this is just using the computer as an instrument. Would you say flute players can't play music "with soul" because they aren't directly whistling the noises? Why not? How is that qualitatively different from using a computer to play your composition?
- holri 13y agoHandmade Pianos have souls. The soul of the technician that built it. This is why the best Pianos like Bösendorfer and Steinways are still built manually.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoThat sounds kind of esoteric / superstitious to me. Has this been blind tested? Anyway... computer music has the soul of the people selecting the samples and the parameters for instrument synthesis, and choosing when and how to play them. That's why all that is done manually. Heck, on the C64 (probably not just there) it wasn't unusual for composers to write their own composing software and playback routines.
- holri 13y agoIn the C64 days I programmed my TI99/4A to play Bach. It sounded awful. The interpretation had no soul. Soul is not blind testable, like art, because it comes from the heart, not the brain.
- Stwerp 13y agoIs soul the imprecision of notes not being perfectly uniform in duration and velocity? That's what your above comment seems to imply. For instance: Consider a recording from a piano played by a human and a computer-generated MIDI file of the same musical piece with included variation/noise in BPM, note duration, velocity, timing etc. This would result in at least single-blind test for `soul' if you were to listen to it. You could tell us which piece you think has more, or any (I'm not sure if soul is quantifiable or just a binary existence) soul.
- vidarh 13y agoI don't get that mindset at all. A lot of the music I listen to is music that is not playable on an analogue instruments without severely butchering it. Ranging from 8-bit chip tunes to much more complex electronic music. Why does that affect the level of communication? To me, the only thing that is different vs a song is that for electronic music the communication is mostly from the composer. But I find that to be the case for most instrumental music, including classical music - a performer that adds so much "personality" to the piece that I notice will generally annoy me.
- holri 13y agoA human interpretation of sheet music is a 3 tier soul transformation. Composer - Interpret - Listener. Computer played music has an digital filter that eliminates a lot of soul in between. Music notation is only a recipe for making music. Playing the recipe is not making music.
- wonderyak 13y agoZappa referred to electronic music (of the day) as 'missing the eyebrows'. Its sort of the uncanny valley of electronic music.
- MoosePlissken 13y agoThere are plenty of other artistic mediums that lack a performance aspect. Painting, drawing, literature, photography. Do these mediums also lack soul because they directly connect the composer to the audience, without a third party to interpret? Sure, if a piece of music was written with the intent that it be played by human hands, then it probably won't sound great when played by a computer. But if an artist creates an original piece of music using electronic tools, how is listening to that piece any different than viewing a photograph, a painting, or reading a book? Many people dislike audio books specifically BECAUSE the filter of the narrator colors their interpretation of the author's words. As with reading, one might argue that electronic music better communicates the author's soul to the audience.
- 13y ago
- derleth 13y agoI'm pretty certain I don't have a soul, either.
- neuralk 13y agoWhen you say "playable by humans," what do you mean? If you mean "physically capable of being played by a human" then I'd say that a large majority of popular music right now is unplayable by humans, simply due to the sheer amount of digital production that goes into them. Many genres of electronic music fit in this category, but while being "unplayable," all clearly have an author (the composer/producer) and an intent (no matter how shallow or profound). But if you meant "playable by humans" on a subtler level, I then ask: Is music coming from a radio playable by humans? Is music written on a sheet playable by humans? Both lack an immediate human operator that is "playing" them, yet despite this difference of media, both are valid forms of music that clearly communicate the intent of a human soul (the former through the radio device, the latter through symbols). I'd argue that using the computer/algorithm used to generate the black MIDI is an instrument like any other. Maybe you were asking something more along the lines of: how valuable is music that is generated arbitrarily or randomly by a computer algorithm, and does it contain "soul" like music produced explicitly by humans? That is a philosophical question about the nature of art and computational creativity, perhaps without an answer.
- holri 13y agoAs Frank Zappa said music notation is like a recipe. He also said eating the recipe is crazy. Hearing computer played notes is like eating the recipe.
- aegiso 13y agoAs an internet commenter I do not understand the purpose of Wifi signals that are not visible to humans. In my understanding discussion is a communication method between human souls. A computer has no soul, likewise Internet "comments".
- 21echoes 13y agothis is like saying books must be spoken aloud, never written down.
- normloman 13y agoOrdinary people like music that sounds good. They don't care how it was made. Only musicians care about that. So whether it was made by human hands or a computer algorithm, if it sounds good, people will listen.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoObligatory quote: "If I hear one more person who comes up to me and complains about "computer music has no soul" then I will go furious, you know. 'Cause of course the computer is just a tool. And if there is no soul in computer music then it's because nobody put it there and that's not the computer's role. It's the role of the songwriter. He puts down his soul in the song if he wants to. A guitar will never write a song and a computer will never write a song. These are just tools." -- Björk That said, I'm not a fan of those particular songs either; less would be more IMHO. But many of my all time favourite songs are chip tunes... some compositions (!) simply don't need additional "soul" added to them, they work just fine played by a robot.
- kalleboo 13y agoSome of my favorite music is VOCALOID-based (musical speech synthesis), so it doesn't even have a real person singing. And it sure as hell has a lot more "soul" that a lot of the music that's been played by "real instruments" (especially your extremely slim definition).
- peterpathname 13y agorecommendations?
- owenmarshall 13y agoI just want to point out how depressing it is that a comment that has spawned quite a bit of interesting discussion has been downvoted so heavily. C'mon HN, be better than that!
- mcmire 13y agoMIDI was never intended to be playable by people. It's just a protocol, you can do whatever you want with it. So saying that this is "impossible" doesn't make any sense. That said, this music sounds atrocious when you run it through a computer, it'd sound better if it were spread out across multiple instruments, but whatever.
- walshemj 13y agoYes if you displayed the full orchestral score to Beethovens 5th on to a single grand stave it would look "black"
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoWhilst clicking through the related youtube links, I found a 3D representation / rendering of one of these tracks (instead of the 2D one shown on most videos), with the notes cascading downwards onto ten rows of keys - gives a bit more perspective to how they made it.
- blackhole 13y agoAs a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can't play. This, however, is just ridiculous. The thing is, it's not at all hard to write a piano piece that's unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you). It doesn't need to be a grotesque fountain of millions of notes to be unplayable. This is better examined not as impossible music, but as an experiment that asks the question "how many notes can you use at the same time and still make a coherent song?" The debate between music that's playable and music that's impossible would be better served by more realistic examples, instead of a small sub-culture.
- bryanlarsen 13y agoEver played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor? 4 well separated simultaneous note groups in a couple of places. That makes it theoretically impossible to play...
- CodeMage 13y agoIgudesman & Joo have their own way of playing stuff like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w
- lstamour 13y agoI love these guys. Saw them live once. :)
- leephillips 13y agoThis had me in tears of laughter. What a genius.
- ajtaylor 13y agoPure genius, and funny too! I couldn't resist posting that link on facebook.
- juletide 13y ago
- raverbashing 13y agoWell, it is definitely interesting. But in this form, I really see no value. I'm only hearing noise in those videos, the noise from the switching on of the note (that slight 'tack') The synthesisers apparently can't handle that amount of notes without some artefacts. And see, they're only adding huge amounts of notes, but no pitch shift and no volume control (apparently) This could be interesting with different (softer) instruments, better synthesisers focused on more notes and more "playfullness" rather than just hammering notes
- romaniv 13y agoYeah, a lot of what I hear and see in the videos from the article is just octave multiplication. I've seen much more interesting effects achieved by interrupting fast-running arpeggiators. Also very complex, but far more melodic, and playable by humans in real time. Not that you can't play multiplicated stuff in real time, it just doesn't sound very interesting. Low-pitch piano keys already have harmonics from higher octaves.
- sixothree 13y agoWe do know that more interesting things are certainly possible with many many notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4
- pavel_lishin 13y agoI read a fair bit of scifi, and wonder what an alien life form would sound like, trying to pronounce English. This is pretty damn close.
- lukecowell 13y agoThis is my new favourite genre of music. It's like a computer is tickling my brain.
- JonnieCache 13y agoPeople have been doing this kind of thing with trackers for some time. Here's Vache by Venetian Snares, from 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2f5gOo1VEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2f5gOo1VEM And here's a webcam video of the sequencer data scrolling past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U The techniques are much older. Here's a screengrab of the OctaMed tracker running on an amiga, playing back the original drum tracks from Aphrodite's jungle classic Beats Booyaa from 1994: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVSe9DubE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVSe9DubE8 And here's the whole of Beats Booya to hear it in context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vts6rqJHMK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vts6rqJHMK8 Real producers chop their beats in hex ;) EDIT: also, most music software includes something called an arpeggiator, into which you play chords, which it breaks up into little sequences of notes according to different parameters. Set the interval down to 20ms or so and you've got your black midi :) That's also how you get those distinctive chord-like sounds out of monophonic soundchips in oldschool video games.
- bashinator 13y agoI rather like Chris Cunningham's interpretation of what it would take to perform Aphex Twin's "Monkey Drummer" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB08leFMRnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB08leFMRnM
- minikomi 13y agoEven more insane - using pattern jump commands to create animations :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeCP6LteWJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeCP6LteWJo
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y agohey this reminds me of the talking piano (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4) MIDIs can do that too right?
- tymathews 13y agoMust...resist...from spending my entire lunch looking at all the videos and wikis.
- wonderyak 13y agoFrank Zappa was doing something very similar with the Synclavier in the 80s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synclavier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synclavier). He also has a piece called 'The Black Page' due to its density of notes on the page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Page Both together here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOK98q_ILA&list=PL945B5DD750E1E5A0&index=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOK98q_ILA&list=PL945B5DD750...
- dllthomas 13y agoYeah, I was surprised by the lack of a reference to The Black Page in TFA.
- kalleboo 13y agoFitting that both the examples are of Touhou song remixes, as Touhou is kind of the video game equivalent of black MIDI (shoot em up with ridiculous amounts of projectiles) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmMDqub_UKA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmMDqub_UKA
- zokier 13y agoThe way I see this is another form of additive synthesis, with poor (technical) sound quality and less control/expressiveness¹. I'd guess a lot of music would appear "black" if represented as MIDI sequence for a pure sine-wave synthesizer. [1] not to disparage it too much as an artform. Art forms from what the artist able to with the medium of choice, and the choice of medium does not it make it automatically better or worse
- oakwhiz 13y ago>MIDI sequence for a pure sine-wave synthesizer Interestingly, we do have this, and it is a crucial component of lossy audio compression techniques such as MP3 - it's the Fourier transform. Essentially you can convert any audio signal into sine intensity per frequency over time, and vice versa. The space-time resolution is somewhat adjustable, so quicker reaction time can be obtained at the expense of squishing nearby frequencies together. I would not describe a lot of music that I have observed as spectrograms as being "black," in fact there are visible patterns that correspond with the harmonics of the sounds being played.
- chmelynski 13y agoI almost like it, but it just has... it has... too many notes. Yes, that's exactly it. Too many notes.
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoPff, needs more notes in that case. MOAR!
- ebbv 13y agoThis reminds me of the kind of stuff I made while screwing around in Scream Tracker as a teenager 20 years ago. The difference is I recognized that it was garbage that nobody would want to listen to.
- breadbox 13y agoI would definitely recommend checking out Conlon Nancarrow as well, who was mentioned at the start of the article. A lot of his stuff is somewhat abstract, and sometimes his rhythmic patterns are really too odd to be heard (e.g. 7:17:27). But then he also has pieces like Study #3a, which is just a bluesy boogie-woogie that just builds. (I would love to actually be in the physical presence of a piano playing that piece; it would be like it was possessed.)
- hemmer 13y agoI would suggest Dan Deacon for someone who writes "unplayable" yet very tuneful pieces: eg. http://youtu.be/TPg4Vcr56F0?t=10m15s http://youtu.be/TPg4Vcr56F0?t=10m15s
- scrozier 13y agoTo quote composer John Adams, "We forgot that music was supposed to sound good."
- lignuist 13y agoIt is impossible to listen to it in the first place.
- ISL 13y agoSnow Crash, anyone? :).
- pit 13y agoI went to play Fujiwara no Mokou's Theme through my Roland Atelier AT-30 [1], but the MIDI file (at 194.4 MB!) is a tad too big to fit on a 3.5" floppy disk. It's got a pretty decent sequencer, and had no problems playing Circus Galop. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVuNg9XWcBA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVuNg9XWcBA
- petercooper 13y agoAnd... a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tristan_juricek 13y agoThe effect is just reminiscent of a very simple FM synth; you start with a sine wave and add another waveform whose cycle starts below the audible spectrum. Start cranking it up, and you don't hear any "pulse" it just takes on a different timbre. So, by playing a bunch of notes really fast, you just end up with a different kind of buzz. I'd rather just use a synth. This is like monkeying with waveforms using a step function. Kind of limited.
- msutherl 13y agoPeople here with critical perspectives are missing the point. "Where's the value?" The answer is that the people who make this music are not making music for you. They make it more as a personal challenge and/or to one-up their friends. There's a long history, going back to 80's[1], of artists abusing various computing platforms to write somewhat melodramatic music that pushes the boundaries of both traditional pop songwriting and the computing platforms themselves. This tradition is closer to hacking than it is to pop music in that it follows its own internal logical of oneupmanship and works aren't produced for any audience outside of the "scene" itself. Black MIDI is just another plausible and entertaining development in that context. Probably some kids who got into the scene and wanted to distinguish themselves by doing something new. It is indeed also in some respects "good music", but at this point it's already so weird that it's not particularly enjoyable to most people. I happen to have been following this sort of music for awhile, since at least the explosion of the chiptune/micromusic scene in the early 00's, and I've learned to enjoy it such that I liked the pieces linked in the article and in this thread. I liked them both as cheesy sentimental pop music and for the "hacks" (e.g. playing a bunch of notes to make a phased "kick" sound) in the same way that someone might appreciate technical guitar playing. Another poster was spot-on when he said that this is basically hacked additive synthesis – that's precisely the joy of it! Ultimately, it's just another acquired taste, like wine or classical music. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
- msutherl 13y agoSome "scene" music that I actually listen to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GIemGd3Ctk&list=PLkMjO0BRqWublSn0cMfeFUiD04gA3GIdS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GIemGd3Ctk&list=PLkMjO0BRqWu... (FM funk) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl7TjvZzWMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl7TjvZzWMY (Zabutom) Basically just really good 4-part harmony on 8-bit chips. It's really not unlike pre-Rennaisance church music (early polyphony), or a lot of modern choral music.
- plaguuuuuu 13y agoThat first one reminds me more of a jazz / electro / rnb / funky house type of thing. Mixed with some japanese video games of course. If that's done entirely on one 8-bit chip it blows my freaking mind.
- some1else 13y agoExactly how many voices do these playbacks include? This couold be limited to just 16 simultaneous piano notes. I'd rather hear it played back on a clean sine synth, where it's possible to distinguish individual notes. I like how Black Midi shares some characteristics with Spectral music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_music http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_music), but the implementations are in most cases still crude experiments.
- daveungerer 13y agoI'm incredibly surprised by the negativity of the comments here. Taking a medium, in this case a piano midi track, and pushing it far beyond its limits, while still resulting in something resembling music, is just about as close to hacking as you can get. Also, constraints breed creativity, and this is just another example of that. It's not the type of music I would listen to generally, but insisting that this should be the case completely misses the point of what's interesting about it.
- jmmcd 13y agoNo surprise -- the people making negative comments here are the same people who said $(your favourite rebellious composer) wasn't music. People who say that are always judged as wrong, in the end.
- plaguuuuuu 13y agoI think a lot of the dislike is from simply not understanding many of the techniques. E.g. in second example, there's a bit where the melody is extremely staccato, but the note length isn't achieved from the keyed duration but by a flurry of other percussive notes overwhelming the compressor/normaliser. I guess without knowing that it might seem uninteresting. If you understand stuff like this you can appreciate the music. I'm not exactly going to sit down and listen to it in a dark room sipping some red wine, but it's a new and unique compositional technique that can be incorporated into other music.
- hubtree 13y agoI could appreciate it if a person was playing it, but as it is I don't see any reason to be impressed. Anyone with music theory knowledge and the right software could make this. What's the point of cramming notes in if it doesn't take you somewhere. I understand it. I have no appreciation for it. sorry.
- _delirium 13y agoAnyone with the right knowledge and right equipment can do basically anything that's possible with that knowledge and equipment. Why be impressed by anything anyone does?
- anotherevan 13y agoI've always thought it would be interesting to see what a really good composer could do with a band (orchestra?) comprised entirely of pianists. I imagine it would be an interesting challenge all around.
- millstone 13y agoThese style of music would make an awesome soundtrack to bullet hell style games. Here's a mashup of a bullet hell playthrough with a black MIDI: http://videodoubler.com/combo/saved/464 http://videodoubler.com/combo/saved/464
- archagon 13y agoThis is pretty interesting. Reminds me of the "speaking piano" a little bit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4
- gwbas1c 13y agoBack in the 1930s and 40s, the term "Musique Concrete" would apply to this genre. Back then, "Musique Concrete" was making music via recording technology that could not be played live. Unplayable music is not new. Some better-known examples are how Queen used to just step off-stage in the middle of Bohemian Rhapsody and play the tape of the mutli-tracked vocals; or how The Who used to screw up on stage playing along with the taped parts of Quadraphonia. Even the Beatles' live performances of Paperback Writer were weak because they used so much multitracking in the studio. What I found interesting was that many of the multi-note combinations were just hacking the synthesizer to produce different sounds. A talented keyboardist could program MIDI sequences triggered by a single keypress and perform some aspects of "Black MIDI" live. In contrast, I didn't think that the two examples were pleasing to listen to.
- namuol 13y agoComposures have been making "impossible" music for a long time. They just relied on _orchestras_ to play them. Here's one that does sound pretty great just on piano, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss
- pter_s 13y agovery cool
- V-2 13y agoHoly smokes Batman, 21 million notes Who'll be the first one to present a novel 21 million pages long :) It's quite a challenge as well (AI might help to take it in foreseeable future). Obviously haters gonna hate - shame on the haters. Personally I'm more impressed by someone who puts together 210 words, but just the right words Yes there are acclaimed authors who invent challenges for themselves, such as Georges Perec who wrote one novel without ever using the letter "e" etc. It's quite fun, it's just meta - it's a bit of "literature about literature", or "music about music", so to speak. Your goal is to prove a point, and art as such (the way I see it, of course) is not about proving a point. If you need 20 million notes to achieve a certain effect, why can't this effect defend by itself, why the need to put this fact upfront, give it a name etc.