Edit: they typically still have enough audible notes to make it sound like a dozen clones of Chopin played together.
I like the "no arts" version that removes silent notes, as it makes it more enjoyable (for me!) to follow what's happening : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcfmPZVqVtw
However, one other interesting aspect of a song like Tau is the "performance" of playing these note-heavy midis. You are effectively recording a live performance of your computer processing/performing the midi file, it is not like playing a recording.
This implies that for a good portion of black midi history, it was not possible for most computers to play those files without screen freezes, heavy skipping notes, and then recovering after the hard portion has passed.
It was/is necessary to overclock CPUs to avoid or minimize these artifacts on songs like Tau.
And it can be said that screen freezes/note skips are integral parts of the performance. At least that's my take and I really do enjoy seeing the computer almost giving up to then recover and finish the song.
It's fun when you hear the effect in commercial music too. For a while it only really showed up in stuff by IDM producers trying to sound weird, but then it got more mainstream and nowadays you hear it in everything from techno to dubstep and even pop.
I wonder if these black MIDI artists require a specific sample set to be used for playback, so they can control how the waveforms interact. I also wonder how much they use velocity, aftertouch, modwheel etc to shape the sound, or if (for example) the percussive effects are just a result of careful stacking.
Right. And this still applies today. And anyway: I bet > 98% of all listeners would not notice the difference between 6 millions or only 1000 notes, even when the system was capable of playing every specified note. The whole thing is just a crazy gimmick with no practical use.
Good point; and if they would be audible the latency would have been unbearable, since the MIDI 1.x protocol only supports ~31kbit/s; each note requires 3 bytes for on an off each; so e.g. a chord with more than ~20 notes no longer sounds like a chord, but like an arpeggio; many expanders I had were even slower.
There is also a phase like effect that can be done by playing sgales really quickly. I think I saw that in one of the original Touhou black midi files.
And of course there is pressng all 88 keys on the MIDI piano at the same time. I would like to know what that sounds like on a real piano though.
I think black MIDI starts as a rendering artifact in a Japanese music notation software. The name was "Frieve" or something. It renders as many notes put in a measure. Without expanding the view. That is sort of what's going on in the Wikipedia pic.
The mute pedal on an upright/console piano works by situating the hammers closer to the strings; if you stomp on it hard enough, you can get it to jerk all of the hammers such that they actually hit the strings and get this "all 88 keys" noise. I don't recommend this if you care for the piano, though :)
(On a grand piano, IIRC the mute pedal instead either adjusts the position of the hammer to only hit 1-2 of the strings, instead of all 3, or it moves the felts to dampen the sound).
[1]: https://youtu.be/muCPjK4nGY4?t=8
[2]: https://ledgernote.com/blog/interesting/human-speech-piano/
> The piano imitates the human voice and at the same time operates as an alienated recording and reproducing device. It has thus been replaced as traditional musical instrument: no artist operates it in order to play music. It becomes an oversized phonograph which is not used for the production of previously composed music but for the reproduction of the human voice. The sudden comprehensibility of single words, whenever the piano becomes the faithful representation of language, equally has the effect of a phantom’s abrupt appearance: the close up reality of the voice is a ghostly apparition – as though the “forbidden” border between dream (music) and reality (language) had been crossed. The “talking” piano represents a mimetic machine which is capable of producing the mimesis of a mimesis: it absorbs, it imitates what has already previously been imitated, namely the recording of sound.
> From: Chico Mello “Mimesis und musikalische Konstruktion”, Shaker Verlag, Aachen 2010
edit: found this one https://youtu.be/55qst4_T_PE
Steampunk black MIDI - The insane music of Conlon Nancarrow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2reuQyLoZM
Back in the 80s Trimpin traveled to Mexico City to visit Conlon Nancarrow. He made MIDI files of all of Nancarrow's player piano etudes-- highly complex, mostly dense pieces that consist of multiple melodies that move at different tempos. Nancarrow remarked how chilling it was to see all his piano rolls-- comprising decades of work-- reduced down to MIDI data that I'm guessing was fit onto a single 3.5" disk at that time.
That was a good two decades before the Black MIDI pieces referenced on Wikipedia. Yet AFAICT the wider community has never had access to those MIDI transcriptions. (I happen to have one for Study No. 36 that I made manually from Nancarrow's study score for a paper, but I can't remember where it is.)
So...
1. Nancarrow is listed as a kind of spiritual predecessor of Black MIDI on Wikipedia.
2. Nancarrow is also literally one of the early examples of what became Black MIDI decades later, except nobody knows that because those tiny files that could fit on a 3.5" disk were not (and probably still cannot be) distributed.
3. Copyright is one helluva drug.
Just did my good deed for the day and changed "piano cards" to "piano rolls." I'm guessing this article was written by a programmer. I have to admit I like the idea of old school programmers filling out punch cards and feeding them into a piano!
Edit: some discussion here https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/did-any-playe...
According to that article, this should be the first Black MIDI composition (also mentioned in the Wikipedia article): https://youtu.be/6P9ISmtWUKI
I also enjoy this newer version: https://youtu.be/GCIPZrwOBSU?t=35
Both of them never fail to get a visceral reaction out of me...
Amusingly, YouTube is full of videos that claim to be "Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz" but are in fact Marasy's performance[0] of a Cool&Create arrangement of U.N. Owen, which (as mentioned in the article) was the first work to be arranged as Black MIDI.
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546489 - Nov 2015 (119 comments)
I For One Welcome Our New Robot Vocal Cords: Radical Computer Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7195283 - Feb 2014 (34 comments)
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640963 - Oct 2013 (175 comments)
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112 - Sept 2013 (5 comments)
Edit: should have read comments before postin :) It was already mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_synthesis
>Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale.
>It is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are split into small pieces of around 1 to 100 ms in duration. These small pieces are called grains. Multiple grains may be layered on top of each other, and may play at different speeds, phases, volume, and frequency, among other parameters.
>At low speeds of playback, the result is a kind of soundscape, often described as a cloud, that is manipulatable in a manner unlike that for natural sound sampling or other synthesis techniques. At high speeds, the result is heard as a note or notes of a novel timbre. By varying the waveform, envelope, duration, spatial position, and density of the grains, many different sounds can be produced.
>Both have been used for musical purposes: as sound effects, raw material for further processing by other synthesis or digital signal processing effects, or as complete musical works in their own right. Conventional effects that can be achieved include amplitude modulation and time stretching. More experimentally, stereo or multichannel scattering, random reordering, disintegration and morphing are possible.
Granular Synthesis EXPLAINED:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftDLRYnRYZQ
As a counterpoint to "Black MIDI", there's also "100 White Albums":
https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/...
>Listening to the Beatles’ ‘White Album’ 100 Times, All at Once
>When the conceptual artist Rutherford Chang presented his idiosyncratic art show “We Buy White Albums” at the Recess Gallery in SoHo in January, he told a visitor that the exhibition was only part of the project. The exhibition seemed plenty, really: Mr. Chang transformed the gallery into a mock record shop in which the only discs on display were copies of “The Beatles” — the 1968 double-disc set popularly known as the “White Album” because of its stark cover.
>Mr. Chang had hundreds of copies, all vinyl LPs, and what fascinated him was the way each aged and the ways their former owners kept them — some pristine, others with drawings, poetry, messages or scrawled names.
>Now, in time for the 45th anniversary of the album’s release on Friday, Mr. Chang has completed the project’s audio component. While listening to each copy of the “White Album” he collected, Mr. Chang made a digital recording. He then overlaid 100 of them, and pressed them as a vinyl set, with a cover on which some of the more colorful examples of former-owner artwork were overlaid as well. He has posted Side 1 on his web page, and said he would sell copies at the WFMU Record Fair, Friday through Sunday.
White Album - Side 1 x 100 - Rutherford Chang & Dust and Grooves:
https://soundcloud.com/dustandgrooves/white-album-side-1-x-1...
