[gmpi] Re: Drilling down into MIDI->GMPI conversion
- From: Paul Davis <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 11:11:15 -0400
>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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