| Black MIDI | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins |
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| Cultural origins | Late 2000s – early 2010s, Japan (arguably) |
Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song or a remix containing a large number of notes. People who make Black MIDIs are known as blackers.
Though the two are unrelated in origin, the concept of impossible piano existed long before Black MIDI, manifesting itself for example within Conlon Nancarrow's work involving player pianos, in which he punched holes in piano rolls, creating extremely complex musical compositions in the same impossible, unplayable spirit of Black MIDI. [1] Another precursor to Black MIDI is Circus Galop , a player piano composition written by Canadian virtuoso Marc-Andre Hamelin, featuring complex and impossible arrangement with up to 21 notes played simultaneously.[ citation needed ] Frank Zappa also wrote a dense and extremely difficult composition called "The Black Page".[ citation needed ]
Black MIDI was first employed in Shirasagi Yukki at Kuro Yuki Gohan's rendition of "U.N. Owen Was Her?", an extra boss theme from the Touhou Project shooter video game The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil . [2] It was uploaded to the Japanese video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga in 2009, and public awareness of Black MIDI started to spread from Japan to China and Korea in the following two years. [2] In its early years, Black MIDI compositions were represented visually with traditional, two-stave piano sheet music, [2] containing a number of notes only in the thousands. They were created with MIDI sequencers such as Music Studio Producer, and Singer Song Writer, and played through MIDI players such as MAMPlayer and Timidity++. [3] The Black MIDI community in Japan vanished quickly because, according to Jason Nguyen, the group was "analogous to those TV shows where there's a mysterious founder of a civilization that is not really known throughout the course of the show". [2]
The popularity of Black MIDI spread to Europe and the United States [3] due to a video of a composition uploaded to YouTube by user kakakakaito1998 in February 2011 and the major impulse of YouTube user John L. Sinnesloschen [4] [5] who versioned kakakakaito's sheets and elaborated his own compositions and sheets. Shortly thereafter, blackers from around the world began pushing limits of the style by making compositions with notes increasing into the millions, and using an enormous number of colors and patterns to match the complexity of the notes. [2]
The first of these tracks to reach the million-note mark was that of "Necrofantasia" from Touhou Project video game Perfect Cherry Blossom , arranged by TheTrustedComputer. [3] The end of the title of many Black MIDI videos displays how many notes are in the piece. [6] The number of notes and file sizes that could be played back has grown as the computational power of consumer hardware has increased, [2] and while Black MIDIs of Japanese video game music and anime are still common, [3] the genre has also spilled into compositions based on contemporary pop songs. [2]
English-language blackers have formed collaboration groups, such as the Black MIDI Team, where they make MIDI files and visuals together so they can be uploaded online sooner. [2] Blackers around the world have used software such as Synthesia, FL Studio, SynthFont, Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard, Piano From Above, MIDITrail, vanBasco Karaoke Player, Ultralight MIDI Player (a Java program), Zenith, MAMPlayer, Music Studio Producer, Singer Song Writer, Tom's MIDI Player, TMIDI, Timidity++, and Kiva, to create and play Black MIDIs. [3] [6] Some of them, like Jason, record the MIDI files at a slow tempo and then speed the footage up in video-editing to avoid RAM and processing issues. [2]
The term "Black MIDI" is derived from the appearance of the sheet music representation of the music, in which there are so many notes in close proximity that the page looks nearly entirely black. [1] According to California-based blacker TheTrustedComputer, Black MIDI was intended as more of a remix style than an actual genre, and derived from the idea of "bullet hell" shoot 'em up games, which involved "so many bullets at a time your eyes can't keep up". [3] Black MIDI has also been considered the digital equivalent, as well as a response, to composer Conlon Nancarrow's use of the player piano which also involved experimenting with several thick notes to compose intricate pieces without hands. [2] [1] [7] The Guide to Black MIDI, however, denies this influence: "We believe that references to Conlon Nancarrow and piano rolls are too deep and Black MIDI origins must be found in digital MIDI music world[ sic ]." [2]
Black MIDI received some early coverage from Michael Connor, a writer for the non-profit arts organization Rhizome, in September 2013, [1] leading to attention from publications and bloggers including Aux, [8] Gawker's Adrian Chen, [9] Jason Kottke, [10] and The Verge . [11] It has garnered acclaim from journalists, bloggers and electronic musicians, [9] [10] with many noting it as a distinctive and engaging genre thanks to how regular piano notes are combined to make new, abstract sounds not heard in many styles of music, as well as the visuals representing the notes. [2] [6] Hackaday's Elliot Williams spotlighted the style as ironic, given that the fast-paced arpeggios and "splatter-chords" that are developed with a restricted number of voices come together to make other tones that leads a piano sounding more like a chiptune and less like an actual piano. [12]
A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open Sound Control, and possibly audio and automation data for digital audio workstations (DAWs) and plug-ins.
Samuel Conlon Nancarrow was an American-Mexican composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. Nancarrow is best remembered for his Studies for Player Piano, being one of the first composers to use auto-playing musical instruments, realizing their potential to play far beyond human performance ability. He lived most of his life in relative isolation and did not become widely known until the 1980s.
A player piano is a self-playing piano with a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action using perforated paper or metallic rolls. Modern versions use MIDI. The player piano gained popularity as mass-produced home pianos increased in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sales peaked in 1924 and subsequently declined with improvements in electrical phonograph recordings in the mid-1920s. The advent of electrical amplification in home music reproduction, brought by radios, contributed to a decline in popularity, and the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production.
James Tenney was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception.
The Miracle Piano Teaching System is educational software which uses a MIDI keyboard to teach how to play the piano. It was published in 1990 by The Software Toolworks for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Macintosh, Amiga, Sega Genesis, and MS-DOS compatible operating systems.
A piano roll is a music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano. Piano rolls, like other music rolls, are continuous rolls of paper with holes punched into them. These perforations represent note control data. The roll moves over a reading system known as a tracker bar; the playing cycle for each musical note is triggered when a perforation crosses the bar.
Carlos Sandoval Mendoza is a Mexican/German multidiscipline artist mostly recognized for his work joining technology and a Gestalt approach to the art of music composition, multi channel video, time-lapsed performance, AI-assisted art and Ink-Pen Drawing. Michael Zwenzner describes him as a "Socio-critical magician of the extended-multimedia instrumental theater." On more recent Sandoval's work, Davood wrote: "[...] Each piece, whether sound or video art, music composition or intricate drawings, reflects an artist who is as much a global citizen as he is a silent observer of the internal human odyssey".
A pedalboard is a keyboard played with the feet that is usually used to produce the low-pitched bass line of a piece of music. A pedalboard has long, narrow lever-style keys laid out in the same semitone scalar pattern as a manual keyboard, with longer keys for C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, and shorter, raised keys for C♯, D♯, F♯, G♯ and A♯. Training in pedal technique is part of standard organ pedagogy in church music and art music.
Jason Kottke is an American blogger, graphic designer, and web designer known for his blog Kottke.org. He won a Lifetime Achievement Award as a blogger. As of July 2013, his blog is ranked #66 overall and #20 in Science on the Technorati Top 100.
Synthesia is a piano keyboard trainer for Microsoft Windows, iOS, macOS, and Android which allows users to play a MIDI keyboard or use a computer keyboard in time to a MIDI file by following on-screen directions, much in the style of Keyboard Mania or Guitar Hero. Additionally, Synthesia can be paired with MIDI keyboards that have illuminated keys, or with virtual player piano on screen, which some people believe makes learning piano easier for beginners. It was originally named Piano Hero, due to the similarity of gameplay with Guitar Hero, until Activision sent a cease and desist letter to the program's creator, Nicholas Piegdon.
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MuseScore Studio is a free and open-source music notation program for Windows, macOS, and Linux under the Muse Group, which owns the associated online score-sharing platform MuseScore.com and a freemium mobile score viewer and playback app.
Touhou Koumakyou ~ The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil is a 2002 bullet hell scrolling shoot 'em up video game developed by Team Shanghai Alice. It is the sixth game in the Touhou Project series, and the first Touhou game to be released for Windows. The story follows either the miko Reimu Hakurei or the magician Marisa Kirisame, as they fight through the world of Gensokyo to find the cause of a vampiric mist, covering the sky scarlet red in the middle of summer.
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The Studies for Player Piano is a series of 49 études for player piano by American composer Conlon Nancarrow. Often exploring complex rhythmic variations beyond the ability of a human pianist, these compositions are some of the best-known and celebrated compositions by Nancarrow, even though they are generally not considered a set of compositions, but rather individual compositions that were given the same title and status. The dates of composition are unknown, but approximate ranges have been given according to best evidence.
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