[gmpi] Re: Drilling down into MIDI->GMPI conversion

> yes, the overwhelming majority of the controllers are MIDI, but the
> overwhelming majority of musicians *DON'T PLAY THESE CONTROLLERS*.

I suppose this is as good a place for me to jump in as any.  Greetings to
all.

I thought that the proposal was to leave the spec wide open for future
developments beyond MIDI, but that MIDI would conceptually be something like
a subclass of a larger more open spec.  Or would it be better for MIDI to be
a separate part of the spec?  Either way, leaving the spec open to fuller
modelling of performances shouldn't be off the table.  I don't believe that
it is off the table for those supporting MIDI in GMPI.  I know that I am
interested in MIDI in GMPI as a bridge to the future if I may use a cliche.

Plugin developers are lazy.  Yep.  So what?  Why shouldn't they be with
regard to learning and using "the next great thing."  How many next great
things have come and gone?  Where is the harm in making the transition
easier?  Backward-compatability should be an issue even in development.
Addressing the concerns of those with legacy code ought to recognized also.

Further, it's a public relations issue.  While there are many musicians who
will applaud the *possibility* of future controllers which do a better job
of modelling their performances, there will also be MIDI-based musicians who
will be rightfully concerned about translations of their MIDI performances.
We've all had enough experience with adapters, wrappers, and moving
performances between hosts to know that all things do not translate
perfectly.  Will there be concern about the abandonment of MIDI?  I think
so.  Software synthesis doesn't need another gate to wider acceptance.

Do I think that musicians should be forced into MIDI when the spec can be
written to model their performances better?  No.  Do I think that musicians
and studios who have based their livelihoods around the MIDI standard (warts
and all) should have to deal with a potentially inferior implementation of
it?  No.  Both of these goals need not be mutually exclusive.

To address a concern which has not been expressed, but may be implied.  If
MIDI is available, what incentive is there for controller manufacturers to
develop beyond MIDI?  This, I believe, assumes too much laziness.  In fact,
it gives the impression that we think we can force someone to do the right
thing.  If there are a large group of musicians who wish to have their
performances modelled more accurately than MIDI, which I believe there are,
the demand for controllers and plugins to cater to these musicians will
follow.  Follow quickly too I believe.  Especially if, after porting their
plugins, developers discover that GMPI is easier to use without MIDI.  But,
they need to get there first.  Which requires public interest, and a
non-threatening SDK.  Plugin developers have been around enough to know that
when an SDK is easy, trust us, that it may not be so.  So the first thing
you hit them over the head with is, "You have to learn a new way to control
your dsp code beyond MIDI" when they have been living and breathing MIDI all
of their professional lives, I suspect it will be quite a turnoff.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Davis" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 9:11 AM
Subject: [gmpi] Re: Drilling down into MIDI->GMPI conversion


> >I didn't say "input", I said "musical performances."  In most cases --
> >maybe even 99% of them -- the music starts with a performance.  In a
> >live situation the music is *always* the performance.
> >
> >> 99% of the external hardware input, maybe, this year.  But quite a few
> >new (non keyboard) hardware controller's are USB HID
> >
> >I don't know the status, but take a look in a music shop or music
> >catalogs.  The overwhelming majority of controllers are MIDI.
>
> the technical details can wait for later.
>
> yes, the overwhelming majority of the controllers are MIDI, but the
> overwhelming majority of musicians *DON'T PLAY THESE CONTROLLERS*.
>
> my interpretation of what you're suggesting re: MIDI's dominance in
> the marketplace is that you want to value market values over musical
> ones. i don't know of any professional musician (by which i mean a
> person who makes a significant though not necessarily majority portion
> of their income playing music) who thinks that MIDI is a good way to
> record musical performance. yes, i know of many who use it
> neverthless, because its the *only* thing available.
>
> i know of quite a few musicians for whom MIDI is a more-or-less
> impossible technology as far as their own musical performance:
> cellists, clarinetists, tuba players and percussionists, to name just
> a handful. this is partly about transducers and partly about the
> inability of MIDI to capture the details of their performance - the
> details that let you know its david meyer playing contrabass, not
> eberhard weber or miroslav vitous, even when its the same piece.
>
> i am not interested in limiting GMPI's notion of control to the one
> embodied in MIDI. i don't agree with the technical issues you've
> raised, and i'll try to address those separately. but i feel very
> strongly (perhaps even as strongly as michael gogins) that this
> elevation of MIDI to a pedestal as a superb piece of technology that
> all musicians are just absolutely wedded to is a gigantic
> mistake.
>
> Moreover, i believe that its driven by wanting to sell a lot of
> product to people who are not musicians. I don't mean this in a
> personal sense - you yourself may have very different motivations -
> but the way the market presents MIDI as a technology is a result of
> this kind of commercially-driven group-think. Its a phenomenally
> successful technology, brilliant in its conception and almost
> brilliant in its execution. Would that we could do such a good job on
> GMPI. But its also a profoundly limited technology, and one that has
> never been used to record music performance by most practicing
> musicians because they play instruments that do not (and more-or-less
> cannot) do MIDI.
>
> --p
>
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