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You're making the fundamental mistake that all notes that are written down are the same. A midi-file isn't a score, it's a recording of the playback of notes. A performer can sit down at a midi enabled Steinway Grand and record their performance into a midi file, then they can play back that exact performance on the same piano and it will sound identical to the original. If you were to listen to such a playback with your back turned, you would be unable to tell if the pianist was playing, or if the midi was.

Programming a machine to play something back in just the way the composer wanted is the same as performance. The composer get to become the performance artist interpreting and setting their own will, their "soul" as you want to call it, into the machine. So that their music is interpreted and heard exactly as they wished it to be. It's no different than if the composer were to perform their own compositions.

You may not like the instrument being used here, or the way in which the composer has expressed their intent in the recording, but it's exactly as they intended.



The OP mentioned MIDI music that is not playable by humans.


So? It doesn't mean the composer can't write music that exceeds the ability of any human performer and still encode the nuance they intended into the performance.

Just because I can't humanly play Paganini's Caprices doesn't mean it's bad music.


If the composer writes music that is not even playable by himself, then this music is never played by a human. Therefore a soul to soul communication to the listener is impossible.


I challenge John Williams to play the theme to Star Wars on his own! The point bane is trying to make is that the composer can use MIDI to record parts of a performance and then combine it into a form which is then unplayable by a single person [Edit: or any group of people].


I don't even know what a "soul to soul communication" is intended to mean. It sounds like you are applying some mystic qualities to it. I think most of us here don't think that the act of performance itself adds anything to the quality of the sound of the music over and beyond the sounds that are recorded, and so a "recording" that is painstakingly generated note by note is to me no different from one that is played live as long as they sound the same. If a piece has never, ever been played live, it makes no difference to me.

This "soul to soul communication" you talk of has no meaning to me.


99.999% of composers write music they don't and can't play themselves. That's why techniques like this are appealing, because the composer can write the performance at the same time. The written music is the performance. There's no obtuse performer screwing up the composer's will in this scenario.

You have a fundamentally broken concept about music.




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