[aclissold]

This is fascinating! They took a medium I had always classified as a cheap imitation of a real piano, and accentuated its strengths to make it something incredibly! Blocks of notes for percussion, impossibly fast trills for a different timbre of sustained notes, melodies that are detectable aurally but not visually... Awesome!

[bhrgunatha]

> They took a medium I had always classified as a cheap imitation of a real piano

It's all down to the sound generator at the other end of the MIDI cable though. Electric piano's are pretty amazing sounding these days. Lots of music creation software uses sampled, live instruments and some of those are recorded at very high quality. All of which can be driven through MIDI too, although there are obvious limitations to the way a professional can play a real piano, most people would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in a blind test.

Awesome indeed!

[beat]

If it can make a sound, it can be a musical instrument. Black MIDI is really the shallow end of the avant-garde music pool.

I once watched a percussion solo that consisted of a drummer very carefully crumpling a sheet of cellophane. It was beautiful, musical and moving (albeit not very loud). Using things that are not "instruments" as instruments is pretty common among percussionists, and sometimes melodic musicians as well.

[fractallyte]

Some of those visual patterns are reminiscent of cellular automata... So work out the rules, and bring the music (literally) to 'life'!