
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI - wodow
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/23/impossible-music-black-midi/
======
JonnieCache
People 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
I 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)

------
daveungerer
I'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.

~~~
siegecraft
Actually, this is kind of the opposite of constraint breeding creativity. You
have removed the constraint of having to make a piece of music playable by a
human and now you might have a 20 million note song not because it sounds good
but just for the novelty of having so many notes. Like any other medium for
art, there will of course be good and bad pieces created. But a million old-
school geocities web pages w/ autoplaying embedded MIDI tracks I think serve
as a good example that the default judgement is going to be harsh.

~~~
marvin
There's plenty of constraints in this style. You need to have very many notes.
It must be a single instrument. It should presumably sound good or otherwise
have some musical value. There is a lot of exploration possible within these
constraints.

Most of the criticism in this thread are just eloquent formulations of "Get
off my lawn" and "your a faggot". No different from the literally tens of
thousands of previous instances of situations where a new artistic medium or
expression has been criticised.

------
blackhole
As 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
Ever 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
Igudesman & Joo have their own way of playing stuff like that:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w)

~~~
leephillips
This had me in tears of laughter. What a genius.

------
msutherl
People 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
Some "scene" music that I actually listen to:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GIemGd3Ctk&list=PLkMjO0BRqWu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GIemGd3Ctk&list=PLkMjO0BRqWublSn0cMfeFUiD04gA3GIdS)
(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
That 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.

~~~
ingrownpsyche
I don't know if it's done on a real chip or not, but that's FM synthesis, like
produced by the
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YM2612](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YM2612)
in SEGA machines.

------
zokier
The 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
>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.

------
wonderyak
Frank 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=PL945B5DD750...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOK98q_ILA&list=PL945B5DD750E1E5A0&index=1)

~~~
dllthomas
Yeah, I was surprised by the lack of a reference to The Black Page in TFA.

------
kalleboo
Fitting 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)

------
gwbas1c
Back 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.

------
mcmire
MIDI 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
Yes if you displayed the full orchestral score to Beethovens 5th on to a
single grand stave it would look "black"

~~~
Cthulhu_
Whilst 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.

------
raverbashing
Well, 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

~~~
sixothree
We 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
I 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.

------
ebbv
This 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.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
hey 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?

------
tristan_juricek
The 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.

------
petercooper
And... a month ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432112)

------
V-2
Holy 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.

------
namuol
Composures 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)

------
some1else
Exactly 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.

------
breadbox
I 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.)

------
pit
I 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)

------
chmelynski
I almost like it, but it just has... it has... too many notes. Yes, that's
exactly it. Too many notes.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Pff, needs more notes in that case. MOAR!

------
millstone
These 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)

------
lukecowell
This is my new favourite genre of music. It's like a computer is tickling my
brain.

------
archagon
This 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)

------
anotherevan
I'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.

------
hemmer
I 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
To quote composer John Adams, "We forgot that music was supposed to sound
good."

------
lignuist
It is impossible to listen to it in the first place.

------
ISL
Snow Crash, anyone? :).

------
tymathews
Must...resist...from spending my entire lunch looking at all the videos and
wikis.

------
pter_s
very cool

------
holri
As 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".

~~~
Strilanc
Pianos 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
Handmade 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
That 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
In 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
Is 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.

~~~
holri
No soul, is not imprecision. It is the expression of humans feelings in form
of variation of duration, velocity, loudness. For example speed in music is
like speed in breathing. You are not breathing with the same speed all the
time. It depends on the context. If you are in a hurry you breathe fast and
short. If you sigh you breathe deep and slow. An interpret has to understand
the emotions that should be transported. These emotions are unfortunately not
sufficiently presentable in MIDI files or music notation. As Mahler said the
essence of music is not in the sheet. Therefore a computer can not reproduce
the essence of music.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> Therefore a computer can not reproduce the essence of music.

Music that wasn't written on and for a computer, no. Yet it's perfectly
possible to manually craft "variation of duration, velocity, loudness" for
every single note of every single instrument -- just not by feeding music in
standard musical notation into a sequencer unchanged! I agree that MIDI isn't
very sophisticated, but it's hardly the last word of music written on and
played back by computers. Just consider how young this all is! I'm pretty sure
physical instruments and the songs played on them started out kinda
simplicistic, too. And tribal music for example often isn't so much about
expression emotion, but putting people into a trance-like state by endless
repetition, and techno does that just nicely already. It's not my cup of tea
generally, but I get the same out of chip tunes: I don't need sophisticated
music, I just need a canvas for my ears and soul to draw on, I can fill in the
blanks or dream up harmonies on my own.

> An interpret has to understand the emotions that should be transported.

True, but also

a.) it doesn't stop there. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if a
simple "gridlike" composition makes me sad, happy or gives me goosebumps,
that's "soul enough" for me. Even the soul of a simpleton is still a soul :)

b.) the computer enables composer and interpret to be the same person.. and if
they so desire, they can put endless amounts of detail and emotion into a
piece. Personally I have no doubt that people like Mozart would have been all
over computers as an instrument, and the wide range of expression they offer
already.

~~~
holri
The problem lies in the context. If we speak to each other we take human
context into account. So does a musical interpret. It is just another medium.
Music instead of words. A computer does not understand human context. This has
already be proven by Weizenbaum with his program Eliza. If the Computer does
not understand emotion, he does not understand how to create music. There is
no possibility to formalize music exactly, so that a computer can play it
accordingly. I doubt that this will ever be possible because a true artist
takes human context into account in his performance. So there is no static
formalization of music. The only solution would be that the composer plays
live on the computer. But an instrument that can not be played by humans is
useless in this situation.

~~~
PavlovsCat
With computer music, the act of composition and the act of playing it are one
and the same. It's like writing a piece, having an orchestra play it, then
going back to the score sheet and changing something, over and over. Usually
at some point time, patience and/or inspiration run out, long before the song
is really good -- but that's a limitation of the state of the art(ists), not
of music made with computers in general, IMHO.

~~~
holri
No it is not. There is no orchestra. There is an context less, static
description of tones, called sheet music or MIDI. These description gets
transformed to music whenever a musician plays it or to a set of soulless
notes if a computer plays it.

~~~
PavlovsCat
As I said already, MIDI is kind of crude and hardly the last word. The
description can be as detailed as the brain of the composer can handle it. The
acts of composition and performance are indistinguishable. You could even
manually set the amplitude of 44100 (or more) points per second if you wanted
to... arguably the musicians that can make full use of the possibilities that
exist even now haven't even been born yet.

Someone else made a very good point about paintings, and you kind of missed it
by saying computers can't paint like Da Vinci or Shakespeare -- of course they
can't, just like a brush or a pencil can't, and just like a piano can't
compose. Do reprints of Shakespeare's work have soul in your opinion? And do
they have more, less, or just as much soul than exact reproductions of his
original handwriting? Is it possible to communicate soul by typing as we do
right now, or would we have to see and smell the hands doing the typing for
that, and heads pausing in reflection? Can a photo made with a DSLR and
tweaked in a RAW converter have soul? Can a big format analogue photograph?
What resolution does soul have, what resolution does our perception of it
have? If facial expressions convey soul, does imperfection of sight reduce the
amount of soul being communicated? Why does a piano piece that can move one
human deeply leave another completely cold? Why can a landscape, even one
devoid of plants and animals, make the soul sing, why does soul get perceived
where none was put into? If it's because God created it, how does this not
apply to computers as well? So many questions ^^

~~~
bane
He's making a more fundamental mistake, borne by his lack of emotional range.

He's arguing that every poem cannot have a soul, only during the recitation of
a poem, by a live performer, can the work take on the kind of soulful meaning.

Yet this criteria, a human must perform art for it to have a soul, eliminates
_all_ non-performance art. Painting, sculpture, etc. all has no soul.

Yet this is obviously not true. A great painting has soul just as much as any
other art.

So what happens when you have a poem, crafted as a sculpture? We've already
determined that sculptures have a "soul", therefore something like this
[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GIchwvJ-
aNk/SxMre-2FXnI/AAAAAAAANW...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GIchwvJ-
aNk/SxMre-2FXnI/AAAAAAAANWQ/kghdAVLFdWI/s400/Laguna+beach+park+poem+sculpture.jpg)
has a soul, but no human performed it. The emotional connection is made via
the writer and the sculpture (who may even be the same person). Yet, no human
can "perform" this sculpture.

In cases like the OP, the music we have here is no different than a sculpture
of the composer's intention. No human performs it, yet it's no less valid than
if it was written down for an orchestra of painists to perform.

~~~
holri
Do you know and understand the painting "This is not a pipe" by Margritte?

~~~
bane
That painting hangs in pretty much every independent coffee shop and cafe in
probably 50 countries.

~~~
holri
Great, and what does it mean?

~~~
bane
You've got to be kidding me. It means it's a painting, not an actual pipe. And
by extension, other representational art is not what it represents but
something else. But it doesn't matter to you, because the painting is not
being performed by a human, and is the same every time you look at it,
therefore it, you claim, it doesn't have a soul.

~~~
holri
A painting exists to moment it is drawn and it is persistent more or less for
at least a few hundred years. Music on the other hand is ordered vibration of
air molecules (and this is something different than a composition, hence the
pipe example). These vibrations are vanishing immediately. Therefore a
painting does not have to be performed like music.

Every form of human art has a soul, a painting, or the actually played music.
Computer made "art" does not have a soul, although it may have the same
physical structure than a human made one.

