[sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait? Hells, yeah!

[Ian Fritz]

At 10:59 PM 1/13/2002, Chris Randall wrote:


>.. I again submit that this entire conversation is very strange. What is
>the main purpose of MIDI? To record a person's playing, so that it may be
>edited to suit a particular scenario, or repeated ad nauseum on an
>instrument other than the performance was originally generated, generally in
>a live situation where the performer either doesn't want to, or can't, play
>the performance himself, but wants consistancy.

Well, this isn't the main purpose of MIDI to me.  MIDI is a means of 
transmitting control information to a wide variety of devices. This means 
that if you have an expressive controller, then you can play (musically) a 
wide variety of "instruments" (or patches or voices or whatever you want to 
call them).  Obviously it would be dumb to take control information from an 
instrument and just use it to control the same instrument.


>Assuming we can agree on that fact, and assuming that we can also agree that
>for it's primary purpose is well suited to the paradigm of the synthesizer,
>an instrument which lives very much in a 1-0 on-off world, would it be fair
>to say that MIDI (which as we've all more or less agreed is definitely not
>musical, in and of itself, being nothing more than a stream of data) is
>capable of reproducing a performance which could be considered musical?

The emphasis of commercial synths has mostly been on the note on / note-off 
paradigm (which is why I have stayed with analog for most of my wind 
controller work). But there are some devices that allow a fair amount of CC 
modulation that can be used for enhancing expression. The Yamaha VL synths, 
for example.

   Ian