![]() ![]() ![]() According to the Black MIDI Wiki page, the movement first spread to Korea and China, and in 2012 to the United States and Europe.īlackers across the globe, many of them teens and preteens, are embroiled in a ferocious game of one-upsmanship, battling to see how many notes they can cram into a single composition. The “blackers” first cropped up in Japan in 2009, sharing videos on the Japanese video site Nico Nico Douga. As more and more notes get stacked in insane multi-octave chords, arpeggios, and overclocked melodies, the score literally blackens. Every producer in the world uses it, and it’s traditionally transcribed on a grid, using dashes laid out to indicate the pitch, volume, duration and the timing of musical notes.īut you can also transcribe MIDI notation into standard sheet music format, and a couple years ago some bedroom producers in Japan started trying to stack as many MIDI "notes" into a score as they could, sometimes clocking up to 100,000 in a single piece. Popularized in the mid-80s for digital music composition, MIDI is a pretty humble computer protocol used for telling electronic musical instruments like synthesizers what notes to play and when. You can thank the wonders of modern processing speed for the Internet’s new weird micro-genre, a YouTube phenomenon known as “Black MIDI." Imagine the bastard love child of Mozart, Steve Vai, and Final Fantasy, or the sound of a million pianos being run through a blender, or a nightmarishly, impossibly difficult game of Dance Dance Revolution being played by aliens on amphetamines. Have you ever tried to cram five million MIDI notes into a two-minute composition? No, of course not.
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