Black MIDI seems to echo 20 th century experiments with the mechanical player piano by composers like Conlon Nancarrow (player piano with punch roles) or Marc-André Hamelin (MIDI piano) who wanted to challenge notions of playability by both humans and machines.ĭancing women at a pool party, men with guns and barbecued sausages, and pink blow-up flamingos: Today, pop culture spreads around the globe massively and without delay. Needless to say, these scores are impossible to play by hand on a real grand piano. In standard notation, the scores become just a black cluster, hence the name Black MIDI (see images). Some are just there for visual purposes, creating patterns, images or words when played in Synthesia or similar programs. Some of the note triggers are clustered on lower pitches to create beats, some create long notes to sound somewhat like string synths, some are stacked to form very fast arpeggios imitating the fake polyphony of early monophonic game soundtracks - for example, the typical Commodore C64 sound. The basic method is to fill up the score with lots of very short notes, keeping the main melody in the front. They rise higher and higher by the year - an important part of the competitiveness of this scene. These numbers are proudly noted in the titles or descriptions of Black MIDI tracks.
They used only one virtual grand piano, but a very high number of notes - once hundreds of thousands, and now dozens of millions. It becomes an audiovisual thing: notes are presented as colorful bars falling down the screen, hitting a keyboard on the bottom.īlack MIDI started in Japan around 2009 when users on the video platform Nico Nico Douga started publishing remixes. It looks better, too: the screen recordings on YouTube show the one million notes playing in programs like Synthesia, a piano training program in the style of the Guitar Hero game. So, I turned back to YouTube, where Black MIDI tracks can be consumed in the form of screen recordings, safely for my computer. A million MIDI triggers pulled, my computer crashed.
#Black midi software
It couldn’t handle the 1.1 million notes of EpreTroll’s Black MIDI version of Miley Cyrus’ «Wrecking Ball.» I tried to play a Black MIDI track in its purest form, from a MIDI file that triggers notes on any software synth (or hardware synth capable of MIDI). From the Norient book Seismographic Sounds ( see and order here).Īt the chorus, my computer started to stutter, leaving the catchy melody tumbling into chaos.
The home of this competitive, technology-based and transnational micro-genre is YouTube – and its community is growing fast. Black MIDI composers – called «Blackers» – try to challenge computers, ears, and eyes with enormous numbers of super-short and dense notes.
An average pop song counts around one thousand notes, while a typical Black MIDI track is several millions.