Black MIDI | Hacker News Reader

Black MIDI

en.wikipedia.org

234 pointsgolyi86 comments

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.

> 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.

The article says they sometimes play them slowly and speed the recording up to the correct speed afterwards.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

> 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

Thanks. Why one white shoe?

The white shoes are padded gym shoes to avoid hematomas.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Its like watching a 'shoot em up' lets play from the early 90ies...

Would master boot record fall into this genre? I always thought it had too many notes to be legitimate midi.

I wondered about that too once you mentioned it and remembered that he recently mentioned that he live streams his compositions on YouTube, although in private videos, and that he made a few public but unlisted with a list on his server. I'm not sure he wants the list easily searchable but if you follow him on Bandcamp and scroll down to June 15th, 2022, there is a link:

https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/community

I looked for a bit and no, although he does use a lot of short notes. Most of the complexity is in the samples (which I guess is the usual way :) ). Or the instruments I should say, I'm guessing those are primarily sample based. He uses Cubase 8, Massive VST, and Superior Drummer 3.

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.

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.

>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).

Hold the sustain pedal and then drop the lid “by accident”.

Tried it as a kid. The score stand only hit the middle half of the keys though :)

That would sound like a very quick glissando.

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/

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

A sample, very popular composition for anyone who is interested in giving the genre a listen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8vzCHkgEk

Here‘s another one from Queen, to give an impression of a more popular song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HjwzR3BqMZ4

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).

Excuse me, was it an F or an F# at end of bar 846?

Both.

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

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

thanks for this, really interesting

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.

Black Midi is also the name of a rather excellent band: https://bmblackmidi.com/

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.

It doesn't seem ungoogleable to me: if you google "black midi" all you find is that band.

You've misinterpreted the comment, this is exactly what they mean. The recent band, has made the term ungoogleable.

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?

It's more in their style if they just thought it sounded cool.

It's more that their heavy jazz-inspired frenetic playing style is somewhat aligned in spirit with the genre.

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".

It's already PyPy, so shouldn't that be "PyPy PyPy"?

Not sure if whoosh, but Django Django is probably named after Django Reinhardt.

Why did they do it?

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.

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)

CHVRCHES is the opposite. Spelled wrong intentionally for SEO.

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.

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.

I prefer Black Country, New Road

Their KEXP session is very much worth watching!

> 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!

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...

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...

Or... This more current rendition of Death Waltz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY

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.

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.

The page does link to it?

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?

It's at the end of the first paragraph of the "Origins and early history" section.

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.

Reminds me of John Stump’s “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”, with an insanely hilarious score.

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

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)

This would appear to be a pre-digital example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gVhBxwRqg

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

I see Nancarrow is mentioned repeatedly and I highly recommend checking him out. The music is quite compelling.

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?

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

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.

Does Rush E count as Black MIDI?

https://youtu.be/Qskm9MTz2V4?t=108

This reminded me of Conlon Nancarrows compositions for player piano.

Edit: should have read comments before postin :) It was already mentioned.

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

Do all black midi songs sound like anime music?

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...

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