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 involved "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 term "black MIDI" is derived from the appearance of the sheet music representation of the music, in which there are so many notes in close proximity that the page looks nearly entirely black. Some of them, like Jason, record the MIDI files at a slow tempo and then speed the footage up in video-editing to avoid RAM and processing issues. Blackers around the world have used software such as Synthesia, FL Studio, SynthFont, Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard, Piano From Above, MIDITrail, vanBasco Karaoke Player, Ultralight MIDI Player (a Java program), Zenith, MAMPlayer, Music Studio Producer, Singer Song Writer, Tom's MIDI Player, TMIDI, and Timidity++ to create and play Black MIDIs. Įnglish-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. The number of notes and file sizes that could be played back has grown as the computational power of consumer hardware has increased, and while black MIDIs of Japanese video game music and anime are still common, the genre has also spilled into compositions based on modern-day pop songs, such as " Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus. The end of the title of many black MIDI videos displays how many notes are in the piece. The first of these tracks to reach the million-note mark was that of "Necrofantasia" from Touhou Project video game Perfect Cherry Blossom, arranged by TheTrustedComputer. The popularity of Black MIDI spread to Europe and the United States due to a video of a composition uploaded to YouTube by user 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. The black MIDI community in Japan vanished quickly because, according to Jason Nguyen, 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". They were created with MIDI sequencers such as Music Studio Producer, and Singer Song Writer, and played through MIDI players such as MAMPlayer and Timidity++. In its early years, black MIDI compositions were represented visually with traditional, two-stave piano sheet music, containing a number of notes only in the thousands. It was uploaded to the Japanese video-sharing 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. Owen Was Her?", an extra boss theme from the Touhou Project shooter video game The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. īlack MIDI was first employed in Shirasagi Yukki at Kuro Yuki Gohan's rendition of "U.N. Frank Zappa also wrote a dense and extremely difficult composition called " The Black Page". Another precursor to black MIDI is Circus Galop, a player piano composition written by Canadian virtuoso Marc-Andre Hamelin, featuring complex and impossible arrangement with up to 21 notes played simultaneously. Though the two are unrelated in origin, the concept of impossible piano existed long before black MIDI, manifesting itself for example within Conlon Nancarrow's work involving player pianos, in which he punched holes in piano rolls, creating extremely complex musical compositions in the same impossible, unplayable spirit of black MIDI. However, there are no specific criteria of what is considered "black" as a result, pinpointing the exact origin of black MIDI is impossible. People who make black MIDIs are known as blackers. Large numbers of notes are layered in close proximity to one another, meaning that a traditional musical score appears almost completely black - hence the name "Black MIDI"īlack MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song or a remix containing a large number of notes.
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