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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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