<story><title>The Impossible Music of Black MIDI</title><url>http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/23/impossible-music-black-midi/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blackhole</author><text>As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can&amp;#x27;t play.&lt;p&gt;This, however, is just ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;The thing is, it&amp;#x27;s not at all hard to write a piano piece that&amp;#x27;s unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you).  It doesn&amp;#x27;t need to be a grotesque fountain of millions of notes to be unplayable. This is better examined not as impossible music, but as an experiment that asks the question &amp;quot;how many notes can you use at the same time and still make a coherent song?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The debate between music that&amp;#x27;s playable and music that&amp;#x27;s impossible would be better served by more realistic examples, instead of a small sub-culture.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acjohnson55</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t see why this is ridiculous. I don&amp;#x27;t think that physical playability&amp;#x2F;unplayability is the key feature here. What does it really mean to be &amp;quot;unplayable&amp;quot; anyway? When you play piano, is it your body that generates the sound, or are you manipulating a machine that generates it for you? There&amp;#x27;s a delay between notating a MIDI file and hearing the resulting sound, but the same goes for the time between your finger hitting the key and the hammers hitting the string. I&amp;#x27;m not saying there isn&amp;#x27;t a distinction between live performance and pre-production, but I think we&amp;#x27;re better off looking at playability as a spectrum than a binary value.&lt;p&gt;We could critique the medium, but people have abused instruments and sound makers for generations. Look up prepared piano [1], glitch music [2], and the wide world of guitar effects. This is just another way exploring the possibilities of a given medium (MIDI, in this case).&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, we could generate all possible music just by adding together sine waves, but realistically, most music is only accessible by using far more limited mechanisms, like instruments, gadgets, and paradigmatic software, which in turn influence the creative process. A person is definitely free to critique the artistic merits of a given piece, but I think it&amp;#x27;s rather close-minded to critique an entire medium. Most of the styles of music we listen to were (or still are) considered cheating by adherents to some other style.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared_piano&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Prepared_piano&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_%28music%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Glitch_%28music%29&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Impossible Music of Black MIDI</title><url>http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/23/impossible-music-black-midi/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blackhole</author><text>As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can&amp;#x27;t play.&lt;p&gt;This, however, is just ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;The thing is, it&amp;#x27;s not at all hard to write a piano piece that&amp;#x27;s unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you).  It doesn&amp;#x27;t need to be a grotesque fountain of millions of notes to be unplayable. This is better examined not as impossible music, but as an experiment that asks the question &amp;quot;how many notes can you use at the same time and still make a coherent song?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The debate between music that&amp;#x27;s playable and music that&amp;#x27;s impossible would be better served by more realistic examples, instead of a small sub-culture.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>I found the result to be a rather monotonous sameyness. The sound of &amp;quot;all the piano keys being smashed&amp;quot; overwhelms everything else about the piece, and the end result is that for all the apparent energy, the end result is really quite boring.&lt;p&gt;Contrasted to its acoustic opposite, chip-tune minimalism, and I&amp;#x27;ll take chip-tune anyday, even in its &amp;quot;pure&amp;quot; form (limited polyphony, no postprocessing, etc, just as you would have found it back in the day).</text></comment>