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Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that uses MIDI files to create a song remix containing a large number of notes, typically in the thousands or millions. People who make black MIDIs are known as blackers. Originating in Japan in 2009, Black MIDI spread to North America and Europe around 2011. The style was well-received by journalists and musicians, who praised the visuals used to represent black MIDI pieces, as well as the new, abstract sounds made by combining piano notes together.
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History
The concept of impossible piano songs has existed for quite some time with Conlon Nancarrow's impossible player piano music and John Stump's "Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz." Similar ideas of producing dense textures through many overlapping short sound 'grains' are found in the history of granular synthesis.
Inspired by granular synthesis, a black MIDI technique was developed circa 1995 by Matt Rogalsky, using the Forth-based programming language ForMuLa to generate thousands of MIDI events per second to play banks of sampled symphonic instruments. Works composed in 1996 using this method for live improvisation include Resonate (noise) and Resonate (tones), which are both featured on the 2007 album Memory Like Water published by XI Records.
Black MIDI was employed in Shirasagi Yukki @ Kuro Yuki Gohan's rendition of "U.N. Owen Was Her?", an extra boss theme from the Touhou Project shooter video game series. It was uploaded to the site Nico Nico Douga in 2009, and public awareness of Black MIDI started to spread from Japan to China and Korea in the following two years. In its beginning years, Black MIDIs were represented visually with traditional, two-stave piano sheet music, contained a number of notes only in the thousands, and were created with software such as MAMPlayer, Music Studio Producer, Singer Song Writer, and Timidity++. The Black MIDI community in Japan vanished quickly because, according to Jason Nguyen (owner of the channel Gingeas), the group was “analogous to those TV shows where there’s a mysterious founder of a civilization that is not really known throughout the course of the show.” However, the popularity of Black MIDI transitioned into Europe and the United States due to a video of a composition uploaded by Kakakakaito1998 in February 2011, and shortly thereafter, blackers from around the world began pushing limits of the style by making compositions with notes increasing into the millions and using an enormous number of colors and patterns to match the complexity of the notes. They also formed the sites Guide to Black MIDI and Official Black MIDI Wikia that introduced and set the norm of Black MIDI.
The first of these tracks to reach the million-note mark was that of “Necrofantasia” from Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga by TheTrustedComputer. The end of the title of many Black MIDI videos displays how many notes are in the piece. The number of notes and file sizes that could be played back have grown with the rising amount of processing and 64-bit programs computers are able to handle, and while Black MIDIs of Japanese video game music and anime are still common, the genre has also begun spilling into modern-day pop songs, such as "Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus. Despite this increased computer storage, there are still Black MIDI files that could cause an operating system to slow down. The two largest black MIDIs are "Armageddon v3" and "TheTrueEnd," both of which contain the maximum number of notes allowed in the MIDI standard (about 93 trillion). Due to the nature of their creation and their sheer size, they are unable to be played back and recorded.
English-language blackers have formed collaboration groups, such as the Black MIDI Team, where they make MIDI files and visuals together so they can be uploaded online sooner. Blackers around the world have used software such as Synthesia, FL Studio, SynthFont, Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard, Piano From Above, MIDITrail, vanBasco Karaoke Player, MIDIPlayer (Java program), MAMPlayer, Music Studio Producer, Singer Song Writer, Tom's MIDI Player, TMIDI, and Timidity++ to create Black MIDIs. Some of them, like Jason, record the MIDI files at a slow tempo and then speed the footage in video-editing to avoid RAM and processing issues.
Analysis and reception
The term "black MIDI" is derived from how there are so many notes that these types of compositions look nearly black on traditional sheet music. According to California-based blacker TheTrustedComputer, black MIDI was intended as more of a remix style than an actual genre, and derived from the idea of "bullet hell" shoot 'em up games, which involve "so many bullets at a time your eyes can't keep up." Black MIDI has also been considered the digital equivalent, as well as a response, to composer Conlon Nancarrow's use of the player piano which also involved experimenting with several thick notes to compose intricate pieces without hands. The Guide to Black MIDI, however, denies this influence: “We believe that references to Conlon Nancarrow and piano rolls are too deep and Black MIDI origins must be found in digital MIDI music world [sic]."
Black MIDI first received coverage by Michael Connor, a writer for the non-profit arts organization Rhizome, in September 2013, leading to attention from publications and bloggers including Aux, Gawker's Adrian Chen, Jason Kottke, and The Verge. It has garnered acclaim from journalists, bloggers and electronic musicians, with many noting it as an distinctive and engaging genre thanks to how regular piano notes are combined to make new, abstract sounds not heard in many styles of music, as well as the visuals representing the notes. Hackaday's Elliot WIlliams spotlighted the style as ironic, given that the fast-paced arpeggios and "splatter-chords" that are developed with a restricted number of voices come together to make other tones that leads a piano sounding more like a chiptune and less like an actual piano.