Comment by th0ma5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by th0ma5 | Hacker News Reader

MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under the strain of other ideas.

I've seen some really great early music (1200s?) MIDIs put together by doctorates, and to simulate the early instruments, each note is hand tuned (or perhaps re-tuned using software, I'm not sure). Those instruments were not diatonic.

Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to, it is just that it isn't something MIDI can handle.

There are a lot of compromises and hacks and such. Recently at PyOhio I saw a presentation about the raw data of the Open Goldberg Variations, and some of the raw data from that device has pressure sensitivity readings outside of the scale of MIDI.

Most artists I see wind up using OSC. It is lower level and more general purpose, and you can convert to MIDI (lossy) if you need it. I was thinking of how to sum this up, but I guess MIDI is good for what it is good for, and like most things, aren't much help when you go down a deep rabbit hole. I love MIDI though!

Have you heard of Scala? http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/

It's used to change around the default MIDI scale, so that you can play with early scales or even scales from other cultures. It's really cool if you get it working with your keyboard. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of software that supports it, although I think Logic Pro did at some point.

Hey err, well I may have stumbled upon this before I knew of its importance, but I could also be full of myself :P Regardless, thank you for bringing it!!

I always wonder if we'll ever see OSC catch on in the way MIDI has by the big name manufacturers (Roland, Korg, etc). You see it in niche interfaces like the Lemur but not much else. Even the Monome devices don't work with OSC natively, they send serial data over USB, you need software to convert it.

I'm surprised to not see OSC being included in even the upcoming version of Ableton Live.

This is one reason I prefer Renoise (though it's a somewhat apples to oranges match-up). It has built-in OSC support, and adding custom OSC message handlers via Lua scripting is relatively trivial.

Is Live removing OSC? That's really unfortunate. I use it with my Monome right now for Live stuff.

Removing? To my knowledge it was never there. Are you sure Monome is not sending MIDI, or going through some intermediary app (MAX for Live or something similar) or an add-on?

Ah yea, I'm running it all through Max4Live.

What kind of Live-Monome apps are you using? Just curious, I have a 64 and 256 myself (I actually was the guy who ported Monome Serial from OSX to Windows, so I'm pretty biased towards Monome devices :) )

Mostly using Stretta's ones. Need to use them more.

I'm working this week to get my modular talking to Live in a useful way using the Monome and an Expert Sleepers ES-3 (8 DC coupled outputs that work as trigger, gate or CV out)

Yeah it's kind of a bummer but Max4Live really helps mitigate things. Especially as a coder, its pretty cool to just pop up a Max js object and work with the Max4Live API directly in code. I'm a long time Reaktor and Max user, but these days I find the mouse-based box-and-wire interface painful when you want to make something somewhat complicated. I believe Resoise has Lua scripting now no? That seems pretty cool, gotta take a look even though I always find trackers to be somewhat tough to get used to.

Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to

The opening in "Rhapsody in Blue" is two and a half octaves, and that's jut the first thing that comes to mind. Also, I'm sure there have been some extensions that enable this, but I don't know for sure; the Yamaha DB50XG I had came with sitar, and while I don't recall exactly the demo song included, it seemed like a reasonable facsimile of Ravi Shankar.

The opening of "Rhapsody in Blue" contains a glissando, which is comprised if a fast run of the individual notes, not a continuous sweep.

Since midi messages are only 8bits, you have only 127 steps of resolution. Augmenting a note beyond a certain point leads to noticeable quantization of pitch.

Many performances I've heard of "Rhapsody" were essentially a sweep (portamento? the terminology is a bit muddled). But even if it's not possible on the real instrument, or the real instrument doesn't have the range, doesn't mean that limit should be there; I agree with you that limits suck, and it would be nice if someone invented something better than MIDI (and made it popular/standardized).

True, I was thinking of the piano arrangement, but orchestral version is opened by a clarinet, and the player usually combines a glissando and a sizable portamento (and not having much woodwind experience, I have no idea how one would create that slide, like in opening of this classic recording http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U40xBSz6Dc)

That kind of slide involves subtly easing off the holes of the clarinet, leaving partial openings. It's a skill I practiced, but never really mastered. I could slide a few notes, but it was never make it that smooth, nor could I slide that many without easing off too quickly and making the slide "jump".

There's a bit of lipping it involved (especially across the 12th), but most of the secret is to drop the back of the tongue (usually somewhat arched) to open up the chamber of the mouth/throat and allow you to play with the resonance a bit. You'll usually hear that run with a bit more of a "wah" (I'm pretty sure I remember that being the official, technical term ^_^)to the timbre than is normal for a clarinet, tightening up into a more normal timbre at the top (where, honestly, fingering is mostly wishful thinking, and has less to do with selecting overtones than lipping does).

On a somewhat related note, the advent of MIDI and the subsequent wind-type controllers meant that I'd spent a whole bunch of money on a Lyricon the previous year for nothing...

Ah yes, I forgot about all the mouth-work that went into clarinet. It's been almost 14 years since I last played with any degree of seriousness. Thanks for the reminder :) It's starting to come back.

http://www.acoustics.org/press/155th/chen.htm

If you go to a 6th grade band class, to where the clarinet nd sax players are not adept at embouchure, choosing reeds and assembling the instruments, you hear all knds of interesting inadvertent things. Single reeds are fantastically flexible instruments. A few months ago i noticed for the first time how similar the tones of Dolphy's bass clarinet and Coltrane's soprano sax are on the 1961 recordings.

If anybody's interested, how to play quarter tone music on sax (pg 25 in the pdf:

http://davidvaldez.blogspot.com/2012/09/quarter-tones-by-don...

I can't quite remember and can't be bothered to look in the spec, but MIDI has multi-byte integer values for use in some cases, and control messages such as pitch bend use this. Could be as little as 2 bytes, but more than 1.

Ah, it's coming back to me now. Haven't really worked with midi in 15 years or so.

Correct, pitch wheel is a 14bit message, going from 0x0000-0x3FFF. Though I do remember that stretching that out a few octaves still produces noticeable stepping.

Also, forgot that midi has a portamento time controller, where you could program the time to slide between two notes, and leave it up the the tone generator to bend the note properly.

Yes this is coming back to me now too what my problems were. The aliasing comes in fairly audible no matter what you do, and relying on the synth then prevents you from having any timing control at all, or over the interpolation. I can't remember what exactly I was trying to do, but whatever it was I'm sure I solved it with Chuck probably, hehe.

how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? ... it isn't something MIDI can handle.

The 14-bit pitchbend command can handle portamento of any range since day one. Assuming you can find a synth that isn't aliasing by the time you get to C8 (good luck), it works just fine.

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