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Comment by daveungerer | Hacker News Reader

I'm incredibly surprised by the negativity of the comments here. Taking a medium, in this case a piano midi track, and pushing it far beyond its limits, while still resulting in something resembling music, is just about as close to hacking as you can get.

Also, constraints breed creativity, and this is just another example of that.

It's not the type of music I would listen to generally, but insisting that this should be the case completely misses the point of what's interesting about it.

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Actually, this is kind of the opposite of constraint breeding creativity. You have removed the constraint of having to make a piece of music playable by a human and now you might have a 20 million note song not because it sounds good but just for the novelty of having so many notes. Like any other medium for art, there will of course be good and bad pieces created. But a million old-school geocities web pages w/ autoplaying embedded MIDI tracks I think serve as a good example that the default judgement is going to be harsh.

...there will of course be good and bad pieces created.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkyGQnZNLYY&feature=related

Delivered :)

Actually, no. Using only one instrument is a constraint when it comes to electronic music. Making it extremely unplayable by a human is another constraint.

There's plenty of constraints in this style. You need to have very many notes. It must be a single instrument. It should presumably sound good or otherwise have some musical value. There is a lot of exploration possible within these constraints.

Most of the criticism in this thread are just eloquent formulations of "Get off my lawn" and "your a faggot". No different from the literally tens of thousands of previous instances of situations where a new artistic medium or expression has been criticised.

No surprise -- the people making negative comments here are the same people who said $(your favourite rebellious composer) wasn't music. People who say that are always judged as wrong, in the end.

I think a lot of the dislike is from simply not understanding many of the techniques. E.g. in second example, there's a bit where the melody is extremely staccato, but the note length isn't achieved from the keyed duration but by a flurry of other percussive notes overwhelming the compressor/normaliser. I guess without knowing that it might seem uninteresting.

If you understand stuff like this you can appreciate the music. I'm not exactly going to sit down and listen to it in a dark room sipping some red wine, but it's a new and unique compositional technique that can be incorporated into other music.

I could appreciate it if a person was playing it, but as it is I don't see any reason to be impressed. Anyone with music theory knowledge and the right software could make this. What's the point of cramming notes in if it doesn't take you somewhere.

I understand it. I have no appreciation for it. sorry.

Anyone with the right knowledge and right equipment can do basically anything that's possible with that knowledge and equipment. Why be impressed by anything anyone does?

"People who say that are always judged as wrong, in the end."

By whom?

You're right to question my bald comment. My answer: history. I think the history of music (and more generally of art) is the story of the breaking-down of existing borders, while the history of those who would try to enforce the borders is the story of Canute on the beach.

Some early music used 5-note scales and regarded 2nds and 7ths as unusable (I'm referring to music in the west; folk music elsewhere often still uses 5-note scales). Early music was monophonic, but that limitation was overcome by the 12th century I think. Bach was genteel, but Beethoven was emotional. Brahms was tonal, but Debussy allowed atonality in music. Cage allowed aleatoric sounds to be music. Glass allowed excessive repetition of simple patterns to be music.

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