[sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait? (long, verbose, and rambling)

[Eddy Robinson]

Jonathon Lippard writes...

> MIDI really was just designed in order to send basic control information
> produced by a keyboard, no more, and no less (and just this information
was
> a big deal at the time IMO, since most synths required the use of

I think this is a little unfair. MIDI has always been able to handle things
like velocity and so on, and in terms of flexibility it has turned out to be
one of the most enduring digital protocols - it's nearly 18 years old now.
Considering how primitive synths were at the time (as you rightly point
out), it's pretty astonishing that the protocol has proved so adaptable.
It's true that there is the fact of it being embedded hardware (and thus a
pain to upgrade), but if it was totally inadequate, we'd have replaced it
already. I love MIDI. I write all my actual music on a hardware seqencer.
Aaaaah.

> controllers.  Clearly they were thinking about ways you could add more
> nuance to a sound you were playing, and the responsibility for lack of
> usage of these controllers lies squarely with the manufacturers of
> MIDI-capable equpiment.

Well...there is customer hostility towards excessive complexity in some
parts of the market, and I think this discourages manufacturers from giving
simpler gear a decent MIDI setup. OTOH there have been loads of missed
opportunities: CC standardisation for example. Almost everything uses CC 74
for the main filter cutoff and there are a few other 'norms' like this. So
why hasn't a standard evolved for assignment of CC #s to LFO rate,
oscillator volume, and the rest?

All the programs like Sound Diver and various hardware editors largely exist
because manufacturers have made little effort to take the standard farther.
There are very few synths indeed that would become harder to use if many
more of the CCs were allocated to standard functions, and we wouldn't have
idiot situations like Logic arbitrarily grabbing half of them to use for its
own plugins (hold on while I reconfigure all my Nord Modular patches...ah
no, that's why I bought the hardware sequencer :-) ).

> Sure, the designers of MIDI obviously weren't performance virtuosos who
> might pay more attention to more subtle aspects of acoustic

Well, only 128 steps of controller resolution is obviously not too subtle.
All the same, there's not that many instruments that fully exploit this
either. It wouldn't be that difficult to build a high-resolution controller
that generated pairs of CC messages to encode a much higher resolution (and
re-integrated the two numbers in the tone generator).

> The shortcomings are pretty damn obvious: a slow serial stream with 20% of
> the bandwidth unusuable by default, despite the fact that proprietary
> parallel interfaces were a practical option at the time.

Of course, tech history is littered with second-class solutions like VHS and
MS-DOS :-) But standards are not the sole provice of technicians, they aer
also tied in with complex business decisions. Looking back over adverts from
that time, gear was far more expensive than today, for what you do with it.
Perhaps manufacturers thought that the extra cost of a better interface
would be the straw that broke consumers' backs, or they were unable to
strike a deal with the designers of those interfaces that would guarantee a
price ceiling on the technology investment necessary.

> [what's wrong with MIDI]

Chuckle... http://www.sospubs.co.uk/sos/dec01/articles/soundingoff1201.asp
and http://www.sospubs.co.uk/sos/feb02/articles/xtalk_midi.htm.

> And for some things that makes MIDI problematic or impractical to
> use.  Which is fine with me: if I'm going to play a mindblowing solo over
> something, I feel that's best done in realtime anyways.  I feel
> the example of a Hendrix or, say, a Charlie Parker solo is a bit specious
at
> best.  You couldn't replicate any Hendrix solo with a trumpet or an
acoustic
> piano, so why slag MIDI for the same limitation?

Well, a synthesizer certainly has the potential to be as expressive as a
guitar in the hands of a great player - and I don't mean Keith Emerson
(nothing against ELP, but I actually think keyboard players and synth
players are two quite different types of musicians...I revere synthesists
like theremin player Clara Rockmore and synth genius Delia Darbyshire (the
woman who created the sounds for the Doctor Who theme music)).

But only the potential. As a sound designer myself (ie I play knobs way
better than keyboards), it's *so* annoying to have a beautiful sound
sculpture going and run out of resolution on a controller. I like totally
overblown synth sounds, but I'm also fascinated by the effects of really
tiny modulations, I love the way that you can redirect the listener's focus
from large movements to small (think of a pianist crashing up and down the
keyboard before playing something delicate and tremulous in a high
register). Unfortunately, I usually have to resort to tricks like remapping
parameter ranges to get these subtle modulations, which is an unwelcome
distraction from the creative process.

> if you want to emulate the nuance of another instrument. Of course, half
> the idiosyncrasy of any solo is timing--that's really more an
> issue of how high the resolution is on your sequencer clock

Interesting how the most revered MIDI hardware sequencers don't have an
over-high cppqn resolution (think of Akai MPC and Yamaha RM1x, the one I use
myself).

> There are ways around issues with alternate tuning, as well,
> it's just that too few synths support that

Yes, another reason I can't bring myself to get rid of my Ensoniq ASR-X -
one of the least pleasant electronic instruments I know to use, but with a
really fantastic sound engine. Pity they decided to hide 50% from front
panel access...anyway this sampler has ~30 tuning tables and you can make
your own too. (Maybe I should make a Chameleon interface for it...).

> Does any of this make sense, or is it all incoherent babbling?

I have to say it does, since you are basically echoing and expanding upon my
printed comments :-)

eddy