I really wanted to embed a MIDI here on my page. In a place like tilde.town
there's a good chance folks reading this will understand the appeal of MIDI,
but I found to my dismay that the format is not natively handled these days by
either Firefox or Chrome. The format has its disadvantages; unlike various
tracker MOD formats with built-in samples, for example, its sound will vary
depending on the soundfonts available wherever the file is ultimately played,
and it's ultimately limited to the kind of data you can express in sheet music.
MIDI is like… the Microsoft Word document format of music. It has certain
advantages; it was designed to be a native format for digital musical
instruments, and it supports much of the same metadata that could appear in
sheet music, including timed lyrics. But the reason so many of us downloaded
MIDI files ca. 2002 was the file size and portability. You could download one
over a bad dial-up connection in less time than it took to listen to the entire
song, and you could keep a whole bunch of them on a 1.44MB 3½" floppy disk; and
if you embedded one in your Geocities page, Internet Explorer could just play it
without anyone needing to install Quicktime or RealPlayer.
I didn't have any MIDI files on my hard drive anymore, but it didn't take much
searching, in the end, to dig up one of my favorites again, a little arrangement
of some background music from *Neon Genesis Evangelion*, a 95-second piece
called "Hedgehog's Dilemma". The file, in its original format, is 6.9 kB.
Rendered to lossless WAV using timidity and reencoded as a variable-bitrate MP3
of average quality using lame, the filesize balloons to 1.6MB, decidedly too
large for the floppy disks I used to put these on.
As our internet infrastructure has scaled up to handle ever more data at ever
faster speeds, they've dropped compatibility with some of the formats and
techniques we used to negotiate these limitations. And maybe I don't need
embedded MIDI, but it makes me wonder how we're treating the developing world,
or how we're treating those holes in the broadband maps of developed countries,
those pockets of a country like the USA where people are using dial-up or a
spotty satellite-based connection. Or how we're treating vast populations of
people who access the internet primarily through mobile phones on a 1GB/month
mobile data plan.
There's a lost artistry to making MIDI files that sound good or even tolerable.
The track names metadata in a MIDI arrangement of the *Neon Genesis Evangelion*
theme "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" have been used to store this note: "Edited and
remixed by
[email protected]. Long, tedious job, damn it!" A highly layered and
sophisticated MIDI arrangement of ABBA's "Lay All Your Love on Me", arranged by
John Schlegel in May 1996, helpfully suggests, "If Your Syth will accept them,
try turning on the above tracks for a more layered, fuller sound!!"
---
I talked to my father this evening, 44 minutes on the phone. We mostly talked
about cars. I don't really grok cars, and I don't generally like talking about
them. But when I'm talking with my dad, I'd rather be talking about cars than
just about anything else we could theoretically discuss.
