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

[Don Tillman]

   Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 09:44:17 -0700
   From: Ian Fritz <ijfritz at earthlink.net>

   I don't have a way to test this, unfortunately. But how fast are you really 
   playing when you do this? Assume you can hit 25 notes in a second. This is 
   40 ms between notes. I don't see where there would be gross distortion. 

Huh?  25 notes per second?  

A 1/4-second slide over slide over 4 octaves of white notes (think
Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis here) is an easy 128 notes per second.

Now try this... go up to a keyboard, play a five note chord with each
hand, then alternate playing them (high-chord, low-chord, high-chord)
three chords a second, double it to 6 chords a second, 12, and even a
rank amateur like myself can do 24 five note chords a second (sounds
like a poor man's Ginastera piano concerto).  That's 120 notes per
second also.

So example 1 is a slide and example two is a pair of chords, both
easy to play and both running 120 notes per second or so, or
8mSec per note.  If MIDI could only handle 120 notes per second you'd
have a trainwreck, the timing would be so grossly distorted that you
couldn't tell the slide from the chords.

An order of magnitude higher speed (0.8 mSec per note) will allow you
to discern example 1 from example 2 pretty well, but wouldn't fool
anybody and wouldn't address the performance subtleties of a more
accomplished musician.  MIDI is about 1 mSec per note.

An additional order of magnitude speed increase (0.08 mSec per note)
is necessary for a keyboard performance that sounds more like a guy
playing a keyboard than a bad protocol over a serial stream.

Okay?

  -- Don

-- 
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California, USA
don at till.com
http://www.till.com