The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

And then there's Peter Ablinger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4

Very cool. I was turned on to the music of Conlon Nancarrow a zillion years ago in college, by a music professor. Nancarrow is often called one of the fathers of electronic music, but he never understood it. After all, he never wrote for a synthesizer or sequencer in his life! Nancarrow's music is very dense and intellectually intense, but it's also very emotional, full of humor and love. It's not (always) cold the way a lot of process-driven composers like Schoenberg were cold.

Nancarrow's own player pianos were customized with steel and leather hammers to get an even more powerful sound. The recordings in his studio are amazing, but I imagine it must have been far more intense live.

If you throw enough sine waves together, you can get anything, but I'm not sure how many of the sounds produced in those pieces are really new. A lot of it just sounds like white noise, or percussion, or tremolo notes.

Also midi output is heavily dependent on the synthesizer. More so when you're throwing so many notes together like this.

Awesome. I wonder how much the youtubification is ruining the audio in the songs.