[sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait?

[Ian Fritz]

At 09:58 PM 1/13/2002, Thomas Hudson wrote:

>Pitch bend is per channel. Thus if I hit an open low E and then bend a 
>note on he high E string,
>I only want the second note to change pitch.

Right -- but you could send polyphonic pitchbend if you wanted to. Just 
send the information over six different CC's. This isn't a MIDI limitation, 
it's a controller/synth limitation.


>Not when you're doing finger vibrato.

Hmm...I don't think you would have to resolve vibrato at less than 10-15 
ms. Of course the receiver has to have carefully designed smoothing algorithms.


>>Be careful not to confuse (1) how to generate control information and (2) 
>>how to transmit it over MIDI. Within the MIDI protocol there are *plenty* 
>>of CC messages available to transmit this kind of information. Making a 
>>control device that could sense the pulloff gesture (and others) would 
>>certainly be a challenge. Designing a synth to use this information 
>>effectively would be another challenge. But these are not MIDI issues.
>However, having generalized methods as opposed to specific methods mean no 
>synth manufacturer
>will implement it the same or at all. Have you ever seen any synth that 
>could use a CC as "don't retrigger
>on the next incoming note on, but rather do it legato." Unless it is 
>specified there is no agreement.

Right. This is a very theoretical discussion! What can MIDI do, not what is 
commercially feasible.


>The synth is capable of playing 16 different patches at once. ch 1, piano, 
>ch 2 drums, ch 3 bass,
>ch 4 guitar, etc. Imagine 16 different synths fed by a single MIDI pipe.

Agreed, MIDI can clog up quickly with multiple expressive instruments.


>>What do you base this statement on? Human beings can only produce and 
>>process information at a finite rate. Exactly why don't you think MIDI 
>>can handle this rate?
>
>It's not rate. It's nuance. Pick up a guitar and scrape the pick on the 
>strings. Do different types of scrapes.
>Turn the volume up and hit the body of the guitar. Drop it. Press down and 
>hold the whammy while shaking
>the guitar to slap the loose strings against the pickups. Take the pick 
>and press down on the strings
>between two pickups, scraping the strings on the magnets. Grab a small 
>television set and move it over
>the pickups while the guitar is feeding back. Turn and run into your stack 
>of Marshall amps, humping and
>grinding the guitar against the amps.

What you are saying (if I may paraphrase) is that there is a huge variety 
of control surfaces for guitar, and one couldn't possibly think of all of 
them ahead of time and build them into a controller. I take your point. 
Maybe one could build a dozen control surfaces, all totally predictable. 
You wouldn't need to play them all at once, so there would still be enough 
room in the MIDI stream. This could be pretty expressive, I think.

Thanks for the discussion -- very interesting stuff to think about.

   Ian