Warning, completely tangential: I misread this headline as "OSX 10.7 will support MDI." Oddly, that makes about as much sense, given 10.7's fullscreen-app focus, since there haven't been any indications of what happens if you try to fullscreen an app with palette windows.
This is great, all of the modern iOS devices are powerful enough to run as soft synths...combined with a multitouch interface, there's no reason I can't have a bank of 303s and 808s such with knobs and sliders and stuff I can move about as well as on a real piece of hardware. If I setup a few iPads I can interface with all that stuff at the same time.
Isn't midi somewhat hacked for theater to coordinate stage events?
If so, interesting uses of soft controls to mix together banks of lights in realtime, in addition to ambient sounds and other stage controls could result.
Though to be honest, I can't really imagine this resulting in anything more 'interesting' than what we have so far. The 'hard' controls used pretty optimized. Whatever clunkiness is there is kinda hard to get around, due to the sheer level of complexity involved. I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. What are the interfaces in real life? Sliders. Granted, an iPad might be able to do funner things than equipment of comparable price, but top of the line equipment (which have motors to move the sliders/knobs to the presets you saved!) is pretty much as flexible and powerful as it can be.
Hopefully the controls would be something beyond NSSlider-s, and allow for chaining commands together into groups that automatically move together, creating effect banks that can dynamically be broken down and controlled.
I doubt it'll take off beyond small, avant-garde stage shows, as most theater effects would be pre-run ahead of time. Might be a stupid idea, but I'm basing a guess on twitter:blogging :: monome :keyboard.
Yes yes... I remember... masters, submasters, scenes, cues... I was the sound guy. My console was like a 3rd of the size with a quarter of the buttons. My manual was less than a 10th the size as the lighting one.
But I got more cables hanging out the back. So it will matches up.
I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders.
Sure, sliders are convenient. But there are accelerometers, image processors, DSP on the microphone input...and multitouch lets you do some thing that don't make sense with a mouse, like pinching to alter the ratio of two two-dimensional values at once (or more). The CPU in the phone or pad is fast enough to do some fun things with complex numbers or whatever and spit out the results via MIDI to a heavy duty DSP. That would be quite useful for simulating vocal tracts or physical modeling things like woodwind reeds or brass tonguing (the different sounds a trumpet player can make by how they put their lips/tongue to the trumpet mouthpiece). There is gear to do this sort of thing already, but most hardware has only multiple 1-dimensional controllers or a joystick, effectively requiring a whole new set of playing techniques. Smartphones make it easier to adapt the input device to the specifications of the player rather than the other way around.
That's pretty clever. I hadn't though about muxing sound and controls together through DSP. The quicktime layer in cocoa would probably make it fairly easy to use a video stream as data input.
Another thing the iPad has over a computer is simultaneity of interface elements, i.e. two people working a dashboard, vs one on a computer.
Exactly what I was thinking, I can't even count the number of times I've been working with a softsynth and wanted to just reach into my screen (or have a configurable multi-touch interface down on my desk) I could touch and work with. The mouse is entirely inadequate...and the number of soft synth interfaces seems to be near endless.
> what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders.
or a picture of google earth that plays local sounds wherever you touch. you're not thinking of the big picture, the interface can be anything you can fit on the screen.
Sort of. MIDI led to MIDI Show Control, which used the same hardware, but eventually that evolved into DMX which is now the industry standard. Same basic concept, but the hardware and firmware have drifted a good bit apart.
7-bit values are still the norm for MIDI, DMX uses 8 bit values and extra bits for flow control, and requires a correspondingly higher bandwidth, so it's not very backwards compatible by now - that is, you could easily write a translator to drive older equipment, but you'd have to make so many compromises that you'd be better off writing something from scratch on the simpler platform.
they also use different connectors, midi uses DIN and DMX uses XLR. they look like they'll fit, but they won't. however you can get cheap USB convertors for either.
A victory for musicians and visualists alike. Musicians have been using touch screens ever since the several thousand dollar Lemur[1], now access will be available to all with iPhone.
You're kinda stuck there, because the capacitors on the audio output of your phone/soundcard/digital synth filter out out the DC that your CV inputs want. I know people who have removed the caps on keyboard outputs and got working audio -> CV but it's pretty drastic unless you're very electronics-savvy.
One cheap workaround you might want to investigate, depending on what analog modules you have, is to send a fixed, high-frequency oscillator out from your digital gear to the input of an analog envelope follower, and modulate the digital oscillator with a digital LFO (using MIDI to play with the LFO frequency). This is likely to yield 'interesting' sounds but unless you have precision gear and can do log-linear scaling (eg freq. > pitch) it'll be hard to do anything useful.
it'll work with anything with DC-coupled TRS outputs, i.e. any decent quality soundcard.
very glad to see more music tech threads on HN. i think the iphone is gonna revolutionize computer music, the problem from the beginning has been the interface -- WIMP doesnt make a lot of sense for the way music works in the brain, imo
Damn shame that Android MIDI and audio support is lagging as then there would be scope for companies to innovate with Android based specialist hardware.
The only difference it seems is that is will there will be MIDI support through a USB connection, MIDI support already exists in tons of apps through WIFI and unlike the article said is being used very seriously in quite a few top DJs I know, Deadmau5, Michael Woods, Laidback Luke, Richie Hawtin at least. The latter who actually got involved writing Griid.
So it's already very serious, Griid, BeatMaker, MidiPad, etc. etc. do exactly what the author of the article says he wants -- they're basically a grid full of clips that you can quickly launch through the iPad, and most of them you can switch the interface from clip launching to controlling effects and other parameters of your DAW through MIDI. Actually not only that but some like TouchOSC also support OSC which is light years better than MIDI.
One good thing at least will be the reliability of having a hard connection rather than sending your MIDI over WIFI.
In terms of professional use you're still going to need at least a sound card and mixer as well, so the computer is not going away. So all-in-all not really exciting as they're making it out to be.
With TouchOSC you have to use a bridge to convert the OSC messages sent over the network to MIDI for the DAW to pick up. (I use OSCulator with Ableton).
2 way messaging can be a pain, it can be laggy, is quite time consuming and unintuitive to map controls compared to the plug and play nature of a normal hardware midi controller. This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW.
MIDI is just one of those things that you're glad happened and it works but you really wish everyone at once would just switch over to OSC as soon as possible.
"This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW."
But no it won't, the TouchOSC and OSCulator guys choose to use OSC and the only way they're going to send MIDI directly is if they build it into the app which they just do now utilizing WIFI.
Can you clarify this please. This is something I am reading up on at the moment (MAX python API, OSC protocol etc).
"This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW."
I was not referring directly to TouchOSC I was using it as an example beforehand. Currently if I write my own controller, I need to implement the OSC protocol to send messages over the network. These messages then need converted to MIDI for the DAW to utilize. With direct MIDI support I can send midi straight out of my application over USB for the DAW to pick up. Is that essentially correct?
EDIT. Just noticed your Soundcloud profile. Nice work.
Yep, MIDI Out. And then a lot of controllers sync with the DAW and so they have MIDI In as well. I.e. let's say I have a fader on my controller mapped to channel A's volume if I change the volume on either the DAW or on the controller they will sync so that they both display the correct volume level automatically. If I change the volume through the controller then it's sending MIDI Out to the DAW if I change the volume on the DAW directly with my mouse say then it's going to send MIDI In to my controller.
Basically you're cutting out the need for a middle-man.
MIDI is going to mean the iPad, with its touch interface, is going to be an excellent platform for soft synths and effects/DSP apps .. meaning less and less mousing around and a lot more intuitive performance in this, traditionally ultra-boring, realm.
How reliable is the latency/jitter in wifi-based MIDI? Last time I was seriously trying to do things with MIDI on a computer for real-time control, admittedly a few years ago, even USB had problems on normal (non-real-time) OSs. Ended up having to stick with PCI interfaces to avoid latencies >10ms cropping up too frequently for my needs. The most recent set of benchmarks I can find that include the whole end-to-end timing are from 2004, though: http://www.suac.net/NIME/NIME04/paper/NIME04_1C03.pdf
Somewhat tangential, but Jaron Lanier has some interesting comments/criticisms of MIDI in his book "You Are Not a Gadget". I'd quote him, but it would go against the spirit of the book. ;) Well worth reading in full.
I haven't read the book, but if my synthesis of 10 serious commentaries/reviews is accurate then I think he is dead wrong about MIDI.
Crash course: MIDI is a serial protocol for encoding of musical control signals at ~32k baud, for an effective timing resolution of ~1 millisecond. Most signals are 7-bit, yielding 128 possible note or control values, freely distributable across 16 channels. There are 120 possible control assignments; the other 7 (128 - 120 - note) are mostly reserved for meta-control, allowing private realtime parameters with up to 14-bit resolution, or bidirectional non-realtime block data transfer for firmware updates and configuration backup.
About 2/3 of the control assignments are standardized, and any MIDI device is supposed to offer a 'general MIDI' configuration with standardized sounds (trumpet, cello, clarinet etc.) controlled by standardized control assignments (cc#32 is always Volume, cc#74 is brightness aka treble, etc.). With these you can specify pretty much anything that could be written in standardized music notation in much the same manner as a music box or player piano. It is supposed to deliver a reasonable approximation of all the instruments in an orchestra and allow control of the way they're actually played, giving you up to 16 'virtual musicians' playing up to 24 notes at once. Of course, this is way too good to be true.
The hideous sounds found buried in the control panel or on Geocities-type web pages are coming out of the cheap-ass General MIDI 'synthesizer' implemented in windows and/or on your soundcard. Nobody in the real world uses this except for those awful 'home keyboards' - usually cheap, although there are also vastly overpriced versions aimed at rural churches and community centers, where people who live far away from a music store learned to play on a cheap Casio and want something that sounds better but works the same way - Bank 0, program 47 will always give you a harp sound, changing controller # 74 will always let you 'damp' the strings etc. This is a huge market which subsidizes the development of more interesting instruments. There is a parallel sub-market devoted to painstaking digital reproductions of acoustic and electric organs & pianos for more serious musicians, but which fit into a car instead of a truck.
Now, General MIDI sounds awful for three reasons: poorly sampled source sounds, crudely implemented modulation of same, and lazy transcription of musical data. The sounds are typically short (50 ms) recordings originally compressed to fit on a 16k EPROM. The modulations are usually bad approximations of inappropriately linear DSP transforms designed to run on some 8-bit uController. The transcriptions are generally bare minimum with no attention paid to articulation or the ebb and flow of musical performance. After all, it's going to sound pretty awful no matter how much you fine tune the control data, so why polish a turd?
In fairness, MIDI has been around as a protocol since 1980 and General MIDI was defined in 1991. The specification came before there were any commercial products capable of implementing it, hence the cut corners described above in a rush to look standards-compliant. Although the technology of audio reproduction has improved enormously and allows effectively perfect fidelity since then, the 'bare minimum' ethic required for standards compliance has never gone away and you can buy quite expensive keyboards that make awful-sounding GM 'music,' identical to that of 10+ years ago. It is this ugliness and sterility that Lanier objects to: far from being a highest common factor, General MIDI instead became a lowest common denominator, and is only ever heard cranking out robotic versions of jaded pop hits.
Where Lanier goes wrong is in assuming that this is a limitation of the protocol. And with only 7 bits for any given musical gesture, it is quite limited. But the main reason 'MIDI sounds so bad' is the ubiquity of the General MIDI standard. You might as wel...
I once played a song at a gig in 2000 (amongst other songs), which was just me pressing keys to trigger samples on my Psion Series 5 handheld. I had wired the speaker to a 3.5mm socket to go directly to the mixer!
34 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 76.2 ms ] threadAnd the palette windows will most likely be in the style of iPhoto, so Apple will most likely public classes for these, a la BWToolkit: http://brandonwalkin.com/blog/images/transparent3.png
If so, interesting uses of soft controls to mix together banks of lights in realtime, in addition to ambient sounds and other stage controls could result.
Though to be honest, I can't really imagine this resulting in anything more 'interesting' than what we have so far. The 'hard' controls used pretty optimized. Whatever clunkiness is there is kinda hard to get around, due to the sheer level of complexity involved. I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. What are the interfaces in real life? Sliders. Granted, an iPad might be able to do funner things than equipment of comparable price, but top of the line equipment (which have motors to move the sliders/knobs to the presets you saved!) is pretty much as flexible and powerful as it can be.
I doubt it'll take off beyond small, avant-garde stage shows, as most theater effects would be pre-run ahead of time. Might be a stupid idea, but I'm basing a guess on twitter:blogging :: monome :keyboard.
See also the painful complexity here: http://www.innovateshowcontrols.com/support/downloads/midi-d...
But I got more cables hanging out the back. So it will matches up.
Sure, sliders are convenient. But there are accelerometers, image processors, DSP on the microphone input...and multitouch lets you do some thing that don't make sense with a mouse, like pinching to alter the ratio of two two-dimensional values at once (or more). The CPU in the phone or pad is fast enough to do some fun things with complex numbers or whatever and spit out the results via MIDI to a heavy duty DSP. That would be quite useful for simulating vocal tracts or physical modeling things like woodwind reeds or brass tonguing (the different sounds a trumpet player can make by how they put their lips/tongue to the trumpet mouthpiece). There is gear to do this sort of thing already, but most hardware has only multiple 1-dimensional controllers or a joystick, effectively requiring a whole new set of playing techniques. Smartphones make it easier to adapt the input device to the specifications of the player rather than the other way around.
Another thing the iPad has over a computer is simultaneity of interface elements, i.e. two people working a dashboard, vs one on a computer.
or a picture of google earth that plays local sounds wherever you touch. you're not thinking of the big picture, the interface can be anything you can fit on the screen.
7-bit values are still the norm for MIDI, DMX uses 8 bit values and extra bits for flow control, and requires a correspondingly higher bandwidth, so it's not very backwards compatible by now - that is, you could easily write a translator to drive older equipment, but you'd have to make so many compromises that you'd be better off writing something from scratch on the simpler platform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Show_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMX512
[1]http://www.jazzmutant.com/lemur_overview.php
One cheap workaround you might want to investigate, depending on what analog modules you have, is to send a fixed, high-frequency oscillator out from your digital gear to the input of an analog envelope follower, and modulate the digital oscillator with a digital LFO (using MIDI to play with the LFO frequency). This is likely to yield 'interesting' sounds but unless you have precision gear and can do log-linear scaling (eg freq. > pitch) it'll be hard to do anything useful.
PAIA has a fairly cheap converter in module rack form factor, just in case you didn't know: http://www.paia.com/midi2cv.asp
it'll work with anything with DC-coupled TRS outputs, i.e. any decent quality soundcard.
very glad to see more music tech threads on HN. i think the iphone is gonna revolutionize computer music, the problem from the beginning has been the interface -- WIMP doesnt make a lot of sense for the way music works in the brain, imo
So it's already very serious, Griid, BeatMaker, MidiPad, etc. etc. do exactly what the author of the article says he wants -- they're basically a grid full of clips that you can quickly launch through the iPad, and most of them you can switch the interface from clip launching to controlling effects and other parameters of your DAW through MIDI. Actually not only that but some like TouchOSC also support OSC which is light years better than MIDI.
One good thing at least will be the reliability of having a hard connection rather than sending your MIDI over WIFI.
In terms of professional use you're still going to need at least a sound card and mixer as well, so the computer is not going away. So all-in-all not really exciting as they're making it out to be.
2 way messaging can be a pain, it can be laggy, is quite time consuming and unintuitive to map controls compared to the plug and play nature of a normal hardware midi controller. This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW.
MIDI is just one of those things that you're glad happened and it works but you really wish everyone at once would just switch over to OSC as soon as possible.
"This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW."
But no it won't, the TouchOSC and OSCulator guys choose to use OSC and the only way they're going to send MIDI directly is if they build it into the app which they just do now utilizing WIFI.
"This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW."
I was not referring directly to TouchOSC I was using it as an example beforehand. Currently if I write my own controller, I need to implement the OSC protocol to send messages over the network. These messages then need converted to MIDI for the DAW to utilize. With direct MIDI support I can send midi straight out of my application over USB for the DAW to pick up. Is that essentially correct?
EDIT. Just noticed your Soundcloud profile. Nice work.
Basically you're cutting out the need for a middle-man.
And thanks. :D
Crash course: MIDI is a serial protocol for encoding of musical control signals at ~32k baud, for an effective timing resolution of ~1 millisecond. Most signals are 7-bit, yielding 128 possible note or control values, freely distributable across 16 channels. There are 120 possible control assignments; the other 7 (128 - 120 - note) are mostly reserved for meta-control, allowing private realtime parameters with up to 14-bit resolution, or bidirectional non-realtime block data transfer for firmware updates and configuration backup.
About 2/3 of the control assignments are standardized, and any MIDI device is supposed to offer a 'general MIDI' configuration with standardized sounds (trumpet, cello, clarinet etc.) controlled by standardized control assignments (cc#32 is always Volume, cc#74 is brightness aka treble, etc.). With these you can specify pretty much anything that could be written in standardized music notation in much the same manner as a music box or player piano. It is supposed to deliver a reasonable approximation of all the instruments in an orchestra and allow control of the way they're actually played, giving you up to 16 'virtual musicians' playing up to 24 notes at once. Of course, this is way too good to be true.
The hideous sounds found buried in the control panel or on Geocities-type web pages are coming out of the cheap-ass General MIDI 'synthesizer' implemented in windows and/or on your soundcard. Nobody in the real world uses this except for those awful 'home keyboards' - usually cheap, although there are also vastly overpriced versions aimed at rural churches and community centers, where people who live far away from a music store learned to play on a cheap Casio and want something that sounds better but works the same way - Bank 0, program 47 will always give you a harp sound, changing controller # 74 will always let you 'damp' the strings etc. This is a huge market which subsidizes the development of more interesting instruments. There is a parallel sub-market devoted to painstaking digital reproductions of acoustic and electric organs & pianos for more serious musicians, but which fit into a car instead of a truck.
Now, General MIDI sounds awful for three reasons: poorly sampled source sounds, crudely implemented modulation of same, and lazy transcription of musical data. The sounds are typically short (50 ms) recordings originally compressed to fit on a 16k EPROM. The modulations are usually bad approximations of inappropriately linear DSP transforms designed to run on some 8-bit uController. The transcriptions are generally bare minimum with no attention paid to articulation or the ebb and flow of musical performance. After all, it's going to sound pretty awful no matter how much you fine tune the control data, so why polish a turd?
In fairness, MIDI has been around as a protocol since 1980 and General MIDI was defined in 1991. The specification came before there were any commercial products capable of implementing it, hence the cut corners described above in a rush to look standards-compliant. Although the technology of audio reproduction has improved enormously and allows effectively perfect fidelity since then, the 'bare minimum' ethic required for standards compliance has never gone away and you can buy quite expensive keyboards that make awful-sounding GM 'music,' identical to that of 10+ years ago. It is this ugliness and sterility that Lanier objects to: far from being a highest common factor, General MIDI instead became a lowest common denominator, and is only ever heard cranking out robotic versions of jaded pop hits.
Where Lanier goes wrong is in assuming that this is a limitation of the protocol. And with only 7 bits for any given musical gesture, it is quite limited. But the main reason 'MIDI sounds so bad' is the ubiquity of the General MIDI standard. You might as wel...
I'm sure it was a first.