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0 pointshootbootscoot6y ago0 comments

I'm not sure you are referring to a control protocol here... "dynamics" are not directly correlated to velocity, and see my lengthy spiel above for why 7 bits is enough, lol...

I really don't follow you on this "EDM full of sonic subtleties that MIDI 1.0 didn't support" ? 1) EDM full of sonic subtleties? pray tell. 2) how does a control protocol support sonic obtusities or subtleties in any way shape or form?

MIDI = note numbers, note ON, note OFF (or you need to hit reset as the note will hang) CC or continuous controller, velocity, modulation, pitch-bend... https://www.midi.org/specifications-old/item/table-1-summary...

you can sniff MIDI messages... there's not much to them.

I'm trying to understand how the control protocol would influence the sonic subtleties? It's my distinct experience to note that most EDM features little to no velocity variance nor any mapping of that to volume of oscillators etc. I've also noted a distinct lack of anything resembling subtlety in EDM, but call me biased as I produced dance music for about 30 years and lived touring as a performing act from it for over a decade, but I digress, as I am wont to do from time to time...

triangle waves? do you mean square waves? aka the artifact of ridulously over-compressed music?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

nitrogen6y ago· 2 in thread

7 bits makes zips on control sweeps. 7 bits is also not nearly enough to cover the expressive velocity range of e.g. a piano.

hootbootscootOP6y ago

7 bits directly coupled to a control of a filter cutoff, for example, will create a zip. I doubt any living pianists can present substantially more than 127 discrete velocity values, however.

Regarding the former point you made: let's not confuse a simple low-level means of remotely issuing continuous controllers with a limited bit value (MIDI CC's) with how you map it in your synthesizer or effect. Smoothing, ramping, interpolating, filtering... You are essentially mapping a coarse range to a finer range and you can apply acceleration curves, etc. there's no limit here, and there hasn't been in software synths/fx for 20 years on this. zipper noise is amateur.

MIDI is essentially a very simply synchronous wire, a stream of events in which the transport timing is THE timing framework, leaving mtc aside for the moment.

to call this protocol MIDI 2.0 is not accurate, as it's more like a meta-MIDI protocol much more like OSC.

all are physical transport agnostic, it's just that MIDI and its 5 pin DIN connector are ubiquitous, present on old gear (old gear is valued with music people...)

and you can connect 1 of those wire, pin 2 or 3 IIRC, directly to your microcontroller and be toggling your sound thingy faster than you can say "debounce"... it's stupidly simple, and the notion of "protocol negotiation" runs counter to the spirit of the original entity.

call this OSC ALT 2 or something...

nitrogen6y ago

7 bits directly coupled to a control of a filter cutoff, for example, will create a zip. I doubt any living pianists can present substantially more than 127 discrete velocity values, however.

Filter cutoffs are another example where 7 bits aren't enough, and if they linearly map to 20..20kHz, then even 14 bits isn't enough.

As for conscious piano velocities, there are ppp, pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff, fff, and you could maybe add pppp and ffff for 10. But those are velocity ranges, and you definitely will notice if every note within a passage is quantized to one of 12 or 13 velocity levels.

First of all there's the accent pattern of each measure where in 6/8 time you'd want 6 velocities. There's also expression within a chord and from note to note on a melodic sequence, where e.g. a note struck by the pinky might be expected to be just a little bit quieter. There are gradual crescendos that might last for more than 12 notes as well. And finally there's just the subtle randomness of the player and the instrument that makes things sound natural instead of artificial.

So for a piano piece to sound natural, you absolutely must have more than 128 velocity levels. Maybe 4096 would get you by. Boesendorfer's older CEUS computer piano system used more, but I never used it and it looks like they have switched to Yamaha's Disklavier.

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All that said, I think you do have a fair point that the jump in complexity is significant from MIDI1 to MIDI2. Each protocol seems to have been designed near the state of the art of its respective time period. Maybe in another 30 years it will be just as easy to drop a $1 microcontroller on a board and talk MIDI2.

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