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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I found the result to be a rather monotonous sameyness. The sound of "all the piano keys being smashed" overwhelms everything else about the piece, and the end result is that for all the apparent energy, the end result is really quite boring.

Contrasted to its acoustic opposite, chip-tune minimalism, and I'll take chip-tune anyday, even in its "pure" form (limited polyphony, no postprocessing, etc, just as you would have found it back in the day).

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I appreciate Black MIDI not really as a "cool gimmick" but more as a genre of music. In my opinion, its main function and appeal is to embody music that is still pleasing to the ear, even if it would be impossible in practice.

The majority of the pieces linked to in this thread probably aren't the best example of this, but I think Dream Battle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzy_WrH8v7U) is quite good in this regard. The piece itself is just a normal piece -- it only happens to be unplayable, and since it is unplayable, there are a number of Black-MIDI-specific "extended techniques" that can be employed (as you'll see).

It's better, yes. Still not my taste, but less monotonous.

Still, I'm not sure this "genre" has a lot of depths to explore. Their time and their choice, of course.

Rock started as music most people thought was too simple to be interesting, and so did jazz and a lot of early electronic music. I think it's really premature to write off a music style most people haven't even heard of yet.

Given how much interesting music (IMO) has come from things like serialist classical, I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone finds ways of producing interesting sorts of tone color that are more difficult to achieve via other methods.

It's only a matter of time before someone in this scene rediscovers spectral music and creates a black MIDI version of Partiels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX77MC5oXDY).

I also think the black MIDI examples that have been posted would sound significantly better with better instrumentation (that is, more expensive softsynths -- I am a fan of TruePianos, personally).

Well, the natural next step for the "genre" is to use something other than just pianos, then use multiple instruments simultaneously, and before you know it you're "just" writing very polyphonic music.

It depends on how pedantic you want to be about the word "genre", and I tend to avoid the word entirely when possible because of the really weird (IMHO) ideations that surround it. But in this case, if we're going to keep it to "piano"-type sounds, which we pretty much have to if we're going to have a "problem" that needs solving anyhow, I think they've pretty much explored the space that's available to them.

And the primary reason for this is that they are not charging into a new, unexplored space... quite the contrary. The piano has been explored for hundreds of years. Rather than opening bold new fields of exploration, this is exploring the last few remnant bits that people couldn't cover earlier due to not having hundreds of fingers.

I understand being open to music ideas, but I also don't believe in entirely turning off my brain. I really don't think there's much "there" there.

Honestly, I think you can take most of the notes out of there and it will sound better. I'm not saying that it sounds bad, but the influx of keystrokes doesn't do much there sonically and adds some annoying artifacts.

>> "In my opinion, its main function and appeal is to embody music that is still pleasing to the ear, even if it would be impossible in practice."

It doesn't take many notes to make something impossible in practice. On piano 11 notes simultaneously makes it impossible for one person to play and it would probably sound a lot more coherent. The black midi I've listened to doesn't sound bad, but it all sounds quite similar - there isn't much range.

You can probably get to 12 to 14 and still sound good by using some of the fingers to play multiple neighboring notes.

I'd be interested to hear what a practitioner of this would do starting from a renowned piece with some actual complexity. It seems like there's a lot of potential for cool effects, but it's held back a bit by compositions that don't use it for much.

There's stuff out there that has a frenetic line paired with a sparse melody that might work well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK5wWD1k7T0

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