[HN Gopher] Black MIDI
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Black MIDI
        
       Author : golyi
       Score  : 217 points
       Date   : 2022-07-28 09:15 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | Floegipoky wrote:
       | Adam Neely made a really cool black-midi-ish fractal of
       | Coltrane's first recorded Giant Steps solo:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J98jwtm5U4E
        
       | tomashubelbauer wrote:
       | A sample, very popular composition for anyone who is interested
       | in giving the genre a listen:
       | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8vzCHkgEk
        
         | mtremsal wrote:
         | Very cool! This reminds me of people trying to play Touhou
         | songs on piano. I think the famous one was "Owen Was Her"
         | (sp?).
         | 
         | edit: found this one https://youtu.be/55qst4_T_PE
        
         | olafure wrote:
         | Excuse me, was it an F or an F# at end of bar 846?
        
           | someweirdperson wrote:
           | Both.
        
         | config_yml wrote:
         | Here's another one from Queen, to give an impression of a more
         | popular song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HjwzR3BqMZ4
        
           | Nition wrote:
           | These are great. They must be abusing note velocity for the
           | "art" sections, right? The melodic parts are obviously being
           | played much more loudly (velocity in MIDI terms) than the
           | beautiful tapestry-like backgrounds. Although I realise a lot
           | of the crazy stuff is also a valid part of the composition
           | (the big blocks of notes emulating drum beats etc).
        
       | jancsika wrote:
       | > Though the two are unrelated in origin, the concept of
       | impossible piano existed long before black MIDI, manifesting
       | itself within Conlon Nancarrow's work involving player pianos
       | where he punched holes in _piano cards_ , creating extremely
       | complex musical compositions in the same impossible, unplayable
       | spirit of black MIDI
       | 
       | 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!
        
         | hcs wrote:
         | I don't think these were used for piano, but there _was_ an
         | organ book music system that used a chain of cards:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_music
         | 
         | Edit: some discussion here
         | https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/did-any-playe...
        
       | merelysounds wrote:
       | Loosely related, MIDI standard can be used to generate all kinds
       | of sounds, even human speech on a real life piano. Here's a
       | demonstration from 2009[1] and a recent article with more context
       | [2].
       | 
       | [1]: https://youtu.be/muCPjK4nGY4?t=8
       | 
       | [2]: https://ledgernote.com/blog/interesting/human-speech-piano/
        
         | lioeters wrote:
         | How wonderful, that gave me the feelies. From the artist's
         | website:
         | 
         | > 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
         | 
         | https://ablinger.mur.at/docu11.html#qu3
        
       | freemint wrote:
       | One method how stuff like a 6.5 million note version of tetris is
       | created that multiple people make their own black midi following
       | the melody and then those get combined together. Supprisingly
       | this still sounds very different from white noise.
        
       | hgomersall wrote:
       | I wondered about this 15 years ago, having never heard of black
       | midi. My thought was around a pianola and what could you do if
       | you used all the notes more frequently. The pondering brought me
       | to Grand Pianola Music by John Adams. A lovely piece, with a
       | different slant. Lots of notes though!
       | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o96o-N-nX-I
        
       | deluxeroyale wrote:
       | A childhood friend used to compose "Frank Zappa"-like music using
       | some obscure MIDI composing software on windows. I used to watch
       | him randomly spread out thousands of notes on the note sheet,
       | press play and it would just sound bizarre and random, I didn't
       | get it. I was 13 and the year was 1999.
        
         | davidthewatson wrote:
         | Surely you're referring to the black page:
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Page I was surprised
         | the Wikipedia page didn't link to it but perhaps Zappa wasn't
         | big in Japan. It is a historically significant work for its
         | "statistical density" to quote Zappa speaking about the piece.
        
           | Sniffnoy wrote:
           | The page does link to it?
        
             | davidthewatson wrote:
             | What I see is that the black midi page links to Zappa not
             | to Zappa's work titled the black page. I'm not sure of the
             | relationship between Zappa and nancarrow?
        
               | Sniffnoy wrote:
               | It's at the end of the first paragraph of the "Origins
               | and early history" section.
        
       | DonHopkins wrote:
       | Also there is "Granular Synthesis":
       | 
       | 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...
        
       | FrozenVoid wrote:
       | I just binge watched a dozen videos, this is probably my new
       | favorite genre. The complexity and speed are on par with very
       | fast electronic but far more pleasant(like classical orchestra).
       | Are all such Black MIDI using only piano notes or this is just a
       | stylistic convention?
        
       | dhosek wrote:
       | It kind of reminds me of how with the band that I was playing in
       | back in the 90s, I was recording each take of each part into a
       | separate track rather than using the DAW's takes feature because
       | the latter made the number of takes a bit obscure and it was hard
       | to pick and choose bits and pieces of different takes for the
       | final edit. At one point, I (accidentally?) played back all the
       | takes of all the parts simultaneously. It was a delightful
       | effect. I don't think we had more than three or four version of
       | each part but those combined made it sound like there was a
       | marching band playing the music.
        
       | nathell wrote:
       | Reminds me of John Stump's "Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz", with
       | an insanely hilarious score.
        
         | jmillikin wrote:
         | Live performance (starts around 3:45):
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCgT94A7WgI
         | 
         | 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.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEQ7XzBnByU
        
       | virgulino wrote:
       | Related, how black MIDI is predated by a classical composer on
       | self-playing pianos:
       | 
       | Steampunk black MIDI - The insane music of Conlon Nancarrow
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2reuQyLoZM
        
         | mlatu wrote:
         | thanks for this, really interesting
        
       | MauranKilom wrote:
       | More history:
       | https://bedrocksolidmc.wixsite.com/blackmidi/history
       | 
       | 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...
        
         | noasaservice wrote:
         | Or... This more current rendition of Death Waltz
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY
        
       | moomin wrote:
       | I see Nancarrow is mentioned repeatedly and I highly recommend
       | checking him out. The music is quite compelling.
        
       | j4mie wrote:
       | Black Midi is also the name of a rather excellent band:
       | https://bmblackmidi.com/
        
         | themisto wrote:
         | Saw them live as my first post(ish)-pandemic show. Fantastic
         | live. They opened with "Call me maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen then
         | did a hard transition into 953.
        
         | jwhiles wrote:
         | Their naming is quite inspirational. If I ever start a popular
         | band I will also try to make some existing thing completely un-
         | googleable. The band Franz Ferdinand also tried this and seem
         | to have failed.
        
           | BLanen wrote:
           | CHVRCHES is the opposite. Spelled wrong intentionally for
           | SEO.
        
           | thraxil wrote:
           | My favorite little band naming micro-trend was bands naming
           | themselves after Python projects, but doubled. Eg, there are
           | bands named "Django Django" and "PyPy".
        
             | uoaei wrote:
             | Not sure if whoosh, but Django Django is probably named
             | after Django Reinhardt.
        
             | lgas wrote:
             | It's already PyPy, so shouldn't that be "PyPy PyPy"?
        
           | bagpuss wrote:
           | you mean you haven't heard of "A" or "My Computer"?
           | 
           | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(band)
           | 
           | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Computer_(band)
        
           | baisq wrote:
           | It doesn't seem ungoogleable to me: if you google "black
           | midi" all you find is that band.
        
             | stedaniels wrote:
             | You've misinterpreted the comment, this is exactly what
             | they mean. The recent band, has made the term ungoogleable.
        
               | WilTimSon wrote:
               | Yep, I don't keep up with new music that much anymore but
               | when I saw the title of this post, my mind immediately
               | went to these lads. Perhaps they thought that naming
               | themselves after the genre would prompt more people to
               | discover it but it backfired?
        
               | ptato wrote:
               | It's more in their style if they just thought it sounded
               | cool.
        
               | uoaei wrote:
               | It's more that their heavy jazz-inspired frenetic playing
               | style is somewhat aligned in spirit with the genre.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | boppo1 wrote:
           | Why did they do it?
        
             | bencollier49 wrote:
             | They probably heard the term and thought it was cool. But
             | it must be enormously frustrating to people who are
             | involving in making this stuff.
             | 
             | That said, it is possible that this could prevent Black
             | Midi (the genre) from becoming a fad, and thus make the
             | "scene" healthier. Sort of like a password to get into the
             | club.
        
           | bencollier49 wrote:
           | Yep, the subject is almost completely unresearchable as a
           | result. It's rather similar to the situation with the "BBC
           | Micro Bit" which horribly polluted the search space for the
           | original BBC Micro computer.
        
         | agentwiggles wrote:
         | Their KEXP session is very much worth watching!
        
         | anewpersonality wrote:
         | I prefer Black Country, New Road
        
       | threads2 wrote:
       | Do all black midi songs sound like anime music?
        
       | bencollier49 wrote:
       | This would appear to be a pre-digital example:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gVhBxwRqg
        
       | jancsika wrote:
       | A parallel, secret branch of Black MIDI:
       | 
       | 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.
        
       | jszymborski wrote:
       | Does Rush E count as Black MIDI?
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/Qskm9MTz2V4?t=108
        
       | praptak wrote:
       | Some (most?) of the black midi scores do cheat a bit. They have
       | bajillions of notes but most of the notes are not audible. Their
       | presence gives cool visual effects (either static if you decide
       | to print it out as classic music notation or dynamic when an app
       | plays the tune) and that's it.
       | 
       | Edit: they typically still have enough audible notes to make it
       | sound like a dozen clones of Chopin played together.
        
         | sheepdestroyer wrote:
         | Tau ("the Song with 6.28318 Million Notes") is an extreme
         | example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0gyQMJHQ78
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | Rochus wrote:
           | > _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._
           | 
           | 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.
        
             | klipt wrote:
             | It's a work of art like any other. It has Tau*million notes
             | and was released on Tau day. There are other references to
             | Tau scattered throughout the video.
        
           | ivraatiems wrote:
           | That was way more pleasant to listen to than I ever would
           | have imagined it'd be. Thanks for sharing! This is definitely
           | a bona fide work of art in my book.
        
           | galangalalgol wrote:
           | Would master boot record fall into this genre? I always
           | thought it had too many notes to be legitimate midi.
        
           | alisonatwork wrote:
           | Thanks for sharing the "no arts" version, that makes this
           | whole post make a lot more sense to me. It reminds me a lot
           | of the effects we used mod tracker days, where rapidly
           | retriggering a note with a short attack could create a new
           | timbre that fulfilled a different musical role to the
           | original sample. I seem to recall "compos" or challenges in
           | the scene where a restriction might be to create a whole song
           | with just one sample (or even just one channel), so you'd
           | make heavy use of effects like retriggers, arpeggios,
           | tremelos and pitch bends to try create something interesting.
           | 
           | 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.
        
           | maze-le wrote:
           | Its like watching a 'shoot em up' lets play from the early
           | 90ies...
        
         | gaudat wrote:
         | Back when I was a kid I played with some of those black MIDI
         | files. I think one of the tricks is to put the same melody on
         | multiple octaves. It makes the sound fuller without going
         | dissonant.
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | bskrobisz wrote:
           | >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.
           | 
           | 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).
        
             | cwillu wrote:
             | Hold the sustain pedal and then drop the lid "by accident".
        
               | gaudat wrote:
               | Tried it as a kid. The score stand only hit the middle
               | half of the keys though :)
        
           | jacquesm wrote:
           | That would sound like a very quick glissando.
        
         | Rochus wrote:
         | > _They have bajillions of notes but most of the notes are not
         | audible_
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | tenebrisalietum wrote:
           | It gets worse when you throw "controllers" in there, which
           | will generate many MIDI events per second to model the
           | twisting of a knob or movement of a slider.
        
           | jsmith99 wrote:
           | The article says they sometimes play them slowly and speed
           | the recording up to the correct speed afterwards.
        
             | Rochus wrote:
             | This would hit physical limits with MIDI 1.x, since you
             | would then have to somehow transpose down the music (to
             | correct for the transpose up because of the much faster
             | playback speed) which would cause a greatly reduced quality
             | (or not work at all) since the frequency range by MIDI
             | expanders and audio equipment was less than 20kHz. And the
             | auditory masikng caused by the ear sets yet another limit.
        
               | mkl wrote:
               | I think you're misunderstanding. The slow-motion screen
               | recording video can be sped up to match separate non-
               | realtime software synthesis of audio (using e.g.
               | Timidity++). It can all be entirely software so there
               | aren't physical limits to worry about.
        
               | Rochus wrote:
               | Try to do that with a factor of e.g. 10 (you would likely
               | need a factor of 1000 to cope with a "composition" of
               | millions of notes) and observe the quality. The "physical
               | limits" (e.g. Nyquist rate) also apply to the
               | calculations done by a computer. To cope with the speed-
               | up of slow motion to real-time you'd have to re-sample or
               | transpose. Even with a very large sampling rate both of
               | these transformations only produce useful results within
               | narrow limits (less than an octave, i.e. factor two).
        
               | mkl wrote:
               | The quality will be essentially perfect. The wave file is
               | rendered in software, as slowly as it needs to go. The
               | rendering speed has nothing to do with playback speed,
               | sampling rate, or frequency. Think of it like a ray
               | tracer generating a few pixels a second and gradually
               | building up the frames of a movie. You could generate one
               | audio sample per second and save them to a file, and
               | twelve hours or so later you'd have a 1-second long piece
               | of 44.1kHz audio. There is no speeding up or resampling
               | or transposition involved because the audio file was
               | generated with the right sample rate (nothing to do with
               | the generation/calculation rate).
        
               | Rochus wrote:
               | I responded to the fellow stating "The article says they
               | sometimes play them slowly and speed the recording up to
               | the correct speed afterwards." which implies a change to
               | the time scale. But also if you do a "perfect" non-
               | realtime offline rendering Black MIDI is pointless; a
               | piano has 88 keys; if you want to play thousands of notes
               | a second then the only "benefit" you get is either a comb
               | filter effect when the same note is triggered nearly the
               | same time or a 3 dB gain (on maximum) if triggered
               | exactly at the same time; there are easier ways to
               | achieve this, even in real-time.
        
               | TheOtherHobbes wrote:
               | The benefit is you can create sample-accurate arpeggios,
               | amplitude-modulated timbres, and other extreme and
               | unplayable effects famously (over)used in tracker music.
               | 
               | You don't seem to have experience of what trackers can
               | do. Essentially Black MIDI is rendered tracker music with
               | a nice animated piano roll background.
               | 
               | On a slow system a render will take longer than real
               | time. On a fast system it won't.
        
               | Rochus wrote:
               | > _You don 't seem to have experience of what trackers
               | can do._
               | 
               | Well, I'm a trained musician and use sequencers since
               | Atari times; a tracker seems to be just a sequencer more
               | geared towards people who prefer to enter numbers instead
               | of playing; if so I would prefer something like csound or
               | chuck; but I was more interested in live music the last
               | few years; here is what I currently do: http://rochus-
               | keller.ch/?p=1153
        
               | mhb wrote:
               | Thanks. Why one white shoe?
        
               | Rochus wrote:
               | The white shoes are padded gym shoes to avoid hematomas.
        
               | oynqr wrote:
               | Is there any software which actually does this properly?
               | I've tried timidity, but it doesn't produce decently
               | sounding output with the black midis I have.
        
           | praptak wrote:
           | I don't believe black midi can be played on normal
           | instruments, it's mostly computer-based (barring the
           | punchcard pianos). In fact even standard pre-black-midi
           | software would probably crash when trying to open such files.
        
             | sheepdestroyer wrote:
             | This is a good attempt at playing Rush E (8 hands):
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbEBrMZ-G_k
             | 
             | I love the whole arm technique to play the bars xD
             | 
             | The original black midi for comparison :
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qskm9MTz2V4
        
             | Rochus wrote:
             | A piano has only 88 keys (if you play outside of those it
             | doesn't sound like a piano anymore, even on a computer).
             | And if you use more than one piano at the same time, all
             | what happens is a phasing effect if more than one hits the
             | same note at the "same" time.
        
               | lewispollard wrote:
               | The point is that if the MIDI file and the synthesiser in
               | question are all on the same system (i.e. a VST in a
               | DAW), no MIDI data transfer has to take place. So the
               | data transfer limit in question isn't applicable.
        
               | Rochus wrote:
               | Even if it's on the same system your piano still has 88
               | keys and you get either a loudness gain per key or a
               | phasing effect when a key is played more than once per
               | time. The only somewhat interesting effect (at least for
               | some) might be that the generator hits its limits
               | (usually 20 to 40 notes polyphony) and randomly decides
               | which notes to leave out or prioritize. But this is out
               | of control of the "composer" and likely not the intended
               | effect.
        
             | jacquesm wrote:
             | I have a real piano capable of midi input here and there is
             | no way I'm going to test the power supply and solenoid
             | drivers by sending them that kind of data because I'm
             | pretty sure that the designers did not anticipate this kind
             | of use.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _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)
        
       | raptorraver wrote:
       | This reminded me of Conlon Nancarrows compositions for player
       | piano.
       | 
       | Edit: should have read comments before postin :) It was already
       | mentioned.
        
       | kome wrote:
       | wow! i did that and i had NO IDEA that there was a niche of
       | people doing that as well. i think i found my people i have to
       | get in contact
        
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