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Comment by iainctduncan | Hacker News Reader

It won't. It will make certain small elements of music making a little easier, but there's nothing in Midi 2.0 that will fundamentally change what we can or cannot do in a way that will be noticeable in music in a broader sense. Compared to something like the advent of cheap digital recording, VST plugins, of fast computers, midi 2.0 is a drop in the bucket.

That said, I'm definitely looking forward to having it reduce the number of hacky workarounds we currently deal with to get high resolution data in convenient forms. Honestly to anyone not deep into the weeds on this stuff it will be meaningless.

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Per-note pitch bend is a big deal, and it could impact the kinds of music people use MIDI for. Right now, it's pretty awkward to use MIDI with controllers that aren't piano-like or to play music that isn't in twelve-tone equal temperament.

That said, I'm kind of pessimistic about MIDI 2.0's prospects. Maybe it'll be adopted by most of the manufacturers, but it's not looking like anyone is in any great hurry to start making compatible hardware.

There are also some problems that MIDI 2.0 just doesn't address (as far as I know), like the limitation of 128 notes per channel, or the difficulty of expressing a volume swell in a way that a synthesizer will play in a predictable way.

What would be an application for more than 128 notes per channel?

Scales other than 12-tone equal temperament, mostly.

Awhile ago, I built a keyboard instrument with 156 pressure-sensitive keys. It's 5 octaves, 31 notes per octave, based on a just-intonation tuning system. Basic sound demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep52Vh6oAOE

The Lumatone has 280 keys. https://www.lumatone.io/

The Tonal Plexus H-Pi is basically a big array of buttons, arranged in 205-tone equal temperament across 6 octaves. That's over 1200 distinct notes. There aren't many of these in existence, but a friend of mine has one. https://hpi.zentral.zone/tonalplexus

For a 12-TET example, one could represent a 6-string guitar with 24 frets as having (24+1) * 6 distinct notes, or 150. Even that is over the limit.

It's possible to work around the the limited number of notes by using the one-note-per-channel trick (formalized as MPE); then you're limited to 16 notes of simultaneous polyphony because that's how many channels MIDI has, but you can pitch-bend to exactly the note you want. But then you're using MIDI in a very different way than it's usually intended, and it's hard to do that without making the user experience worse in various ways.

MIDI 2.0 could have expanded the number of notes so that (with per-note pitch bend), no one would ever have to use the note-per-channel trick again, but that's not the choice they made.

> Per-note pitch bend is a big deal, and it could impact the kinds of music people use MIDI for.

MPE is a thing as well. As the owner of a Linnstrument, I get 10 finger multiple pitch bend over a standard Midi connector to all synths who understand MPE (which are sadly not many, but hey)

You're not wrong, I just think that those who are going to explore this, but who don't already work around the limitations, are a small enough group that it's not going to be any big fundamental change. I'm personally looking forward to it, because I do that kind of thing, and right now have to use hacky solutions like using tons of midi buses and running one note per midi channel to get per note bend.

Don't get me wrong, an improvement on Midi is long (like decades long) overdue, and I'm looking forward to it. It's just not the sea change that the hyperbolic article was claiming, not even close.

I think it's hard to tell what the demand for microtonality would be if it were easy to do rather than hard. Right now if you want to do non-12-EDO music, there are roadblocks everywhere. Instruments are practically non-existent, aside from continuous-pitch instruments like violin or trombone. Standard notation works against you. One would think that electronic music would be the one place where microtonal music would be easy, but no.

I don't really expect mainstream music to suddenly start making extensive use of seven-limit just intonation just because MIDI 2.0 has per-note pitch bend, but for the people who care about it at least we could see a lot more interest in expressive instruments and non-12-EDO musical performance. Even if it's only 5% of musicians who care about any of this stuff, that's still a lot of people.

Yeah I mean the feature that matters most is high resolution MIDI CC so we can finally avoid stepping. It’s great, but long overdue and not really a game changer.

Exactly. It means we can stop using so many midi busses to work around the fact that we get one 14 bit per cc per channel right now (pitch bend), that kind of thing.

Exactly. Though with MPE we may see more controllers that support polyphonic expression. Personally I'm happy that ASM is making keyboards with polyphonic aftertouch.

You hit the nail 100% on the head there. I Couldn’t agree more with what you have said hence the comment and not just an upvote.

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