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Comment by littlebentoo | Hacker News Reader

> listening to this song

Song? It’s just music there’s no singing in it. Midi is an instrumental only declarative format.

How am I only just learning that a a piece of music is only a song if it has vocals? Even the name makes that obvious.

Calling instrumental pieces "songs" does exist in real-life common usage even if it's not "technically" correct. After all, the ancestor post did just that.

Depends how prescriptive you want to be.

A classical music lecture series I listened to [1] claimed this came about because that's what iTunes calls all tracks/pieces/songs. Seems plausible, but probably other MP3 players did the same thing too.

[1] Sorry, no link, don't remember what exactly it was.

Felix Mendelssohn wrote a collection of pieces called Songs without Words for the piano. This might suggest that the term "song" can be more nuanced than simply whether or not there are vocals.

The original German title is "Lieder ohne Worte" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_Without_Words), and there is AFAIK no strict requirement for lyrics to count as a "Lied" (or at least "Lied" is not connected to "singen" the way "song" is connected to "sing").

No no no, the second letter functions like a power button. i means on, and o means off. "Song" means the vocals are off.

> Midi is an instrumental only declarative format.

There's nothing stopping you from using midi data to generate singing: https://youtu.be/Ab4zUFKxVpk?t=87

Here's a much weirder example of using midi data to generate singing: https://youtu.be/ZY6h3pKqYI0

That is low-key terrifying. And amazing, too.

Here's another nice example of this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRlhKaxcKpA

This is absolutely terrifying and I hate it. Congratulations to the author, it's very interesting!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant-Q_transform

Since when does a song require singing..?

It's literally in the name

Words can expand from their original meanings, you know. Look at any music player or just everyday speech, you'll see "song" being used to refer to a discrete unit of music in the same way you could use "track" or "tune".

Maybe, but we can still protest against changes when they are silly. Nobody in French would call Debussy's Clair de Lune "une chanson", why should the English language be oversimplified? Also, good music players use the word "track", and one song (or other musical piece) can span over multiple tracks, e.g. Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother.

It's not about simplification, it's just the way language works and evolves. Like how "track" originally referred to the literal engraved track on a phonograph record, yet you claim that that's obviously the correct term for a musical piece. At one point someone argued like you do now about that word.

I've sung or hummed along to canyon.mid a time or two. We're good. The meaning of the word 'song' has expanded in popular usage. I play the horn (french horn) and I smile an nod when someone calls a clarinet a horn.

Boooo.

What does that mean?

Sorry, I may have been making unfair assumptions about your intent with your comment about the definition of "song." Let's assume that you are just eager to help me understand proper usage of the term. Thank you for pointing this out. I'm aware of the distinction, but was making a choice to ignore it, because I think most people ignore it. And when I was a kid playing around with Windows 3.1 I definitely would have called it a song.

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