[cc-community] Net Band "Packet-In" releases CC BY-SA licensed album

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Wed Mar 19 23:18:11 EDT 2008


Kevin Phillips (home) wrote:
> Secondly, some chip'ins on Terry's observations......

Thanks. I appreciate all the commentary. As I say, I'm not a musician,
so it's hard to make policy decisions about music data.

I have to say though that your observations do sound a little like
overkill for my application (which is music for a graphic adventure
game). I mean, the competition is stuff like "King's Quest" and "Monkey
Island", which used cheap FM-synth sound. ;-)

Yes, I hope we can do a *lot* better than those, but there is a definite
"good enough" factor from my PoV.

The hard part is convincing *musicians* that "good enough" is good
enough. One of the major obstacles I've encountered is perfectionism
(although, arguably my own perfectionism is part of why the project has
been stalled for so long -- I'm not happy with existing game engines. So
maybe I'm being a little hypocritical here).

> Speaking from experience, sheet music is only a guide.

Yes, I had thought to treat sheet music as "documentation" rather than
"source". I'd still like to have it, though.

> A large part of the 
> interpretation is down to the conductors understanding of the piece.
> [...]
> Surprising eh?

Not really. Even I know this much. :-)

> Now listen to the same
> piece played back by a computer notation system like Finale or 
> Sibelius....even with an expensive sound module it sounds soulless and, 
> well, bloody awful!

I haven't actually tried this, but I can imagine.

> I do agree notation provides a useful guide, and where possible it should be 
> provided in open projects.

Like documentation.

> Actually, it's possible to capture a very reasonable MIDI recording of even 
> the most virtuoso performance using appropriate hardware and software.

Hmm. I think you may not be getting what I said -- unless you can
reverse an audio recording to extract a MIDI data file from it?

Some instruments (or "instruments") don't easily produce MIDI data.
Think didgeridoo.

Or even a violin, for that matter.

And of course, human singing.

> In order to share and re-produce a project across various platforms you'd 
> need  :
> 1) A MIDI file (hi-res)
> 2) Soft-synth patches (making sure they're public domain and/or 
> re-distributable)
> 3) Audio tracks (dry)
> 4) Effect plugins (environment and production effects)

That sounds like a reasonable policy to me.

I'm intrigued by the term "hi res" applied to MIDI. Isn't MIDI
continuum-based? (I think of it as an audio analog to a vector graphic
format with note positions described by something like floating point
numbers).

Are there MIDI parameters here that can be specified as requirements?

> In order to share verbatim (guaranteed) :

Skipping this. I don't pretend we're going to get there. :-)

> Your biggest problem is my current nightmare, persuading folks to use a 
> common set of tools.  Musicans are notoriously clingy when it comes to music 
> kit.  They love what they love, that's it.

Oh yeah. I can relate. The contributor who I was discussing this issue
with was very attached to a certain proprietary sequencer software. One
of the problems was that all of the instrument patches were proprietary
as well.

I would've been okay with that if we had the source so we could, if
necessary regenerate with free music patches.

But I think that really bothered the contributor (the end of this story
is that he wanted to go with a By-NC-SA license, and I said "no", and
that's the last I heard from him). I think his real concern was for his
artistic integrity.

>> One question we were not able to answer, but I'd like to is: can you
>> generate "sheet music" from #1. I.e. is there a program I can use to
>> construct readable sheet music from a MIDI file?  And of course, can you
>> do the reverse -- convert a sheet music format to a MIDI automatically?
> 
> No.

I guess you mean only that you cannot recover the original MIDI from
sheet music, since it's already been noted that you can technically
inter-convert.

I'm more interested in the recovery of the sheet music from the MIDI.
I'm thinking of this being analogous to automatically-generated
documentation -- something we can derive from the source code to make it
more understandable to humans. For that you don't need perfect fidelity.

>> I can imagine that this might not be fully roundtrippable. I gather that
>> the MIDI file can contain more information than the sheet music, in
>> terms of subtle variations in note timing, duration, and amplitude that
>> are not fully encoded into sheet music.
> 
> You can't even do that with a MIDI file.

Not full roundtripping, you mean.

The truth is, this is technically true of graphics, too, at a very fine
level. SVG, AI, SK, PS formats all do basically the same thing, but you
lose detail when you switch.

A less severe requirement than full roundtrippability, though is
"round-trip convergence":

A(FMT1) -> B(FMT2) -> ... -> X(FMT2) -> Y(FMT1) -> Z(FMT1)

IOW, A!=B and B!=Y, but X==Y==Z.

Which requires there to be some basic commonality between the formats.
If, furthermore, X isn't "bloody awful" (as you put it :-)), then I'm
probably okay with this.

> Take one can, open it......worms :D
> 
> It's a noble cause, it's something lots of people have talked about at great 
> length (myself included) and it probably needs programmers and musicians to 
> work together and speak to each other an awful lot more.

Yeah. I'm less into the noble cause, though, and more into the practical
maintainability. Having viable source means you can survive a "bus
factor" of 1.*

Plus, one of the graphic artists was apparently abducted by aliens, so
I'm sensitive to the bus factor.**

> I agree.  But I warn you, musicians are hard work sometimes :) .....they're 
> quite capable of improvising and rebuilding a piece of music, instrument by 
> instrument without the need to change their software or use poor-sounding 
> software synths instead of their favourite Kurzweil keyboard which cost them 
> $4,000.

Yes.

> MIDI is from the 80s.  It's ok, it works, but there's lots of things 
> missing.  It's like condemning Open Office to use rtf and csv only.
> 
> I don't mean to be negative, I'm positive about this, honest :)

I hear you. But I am not, repeat NOT, going to get into a conversation
about new music formats! There has to be SOME self-control, and besides
I know there are people much better than me for that job. :-D

Cheers,
Terry


*If you haven't heard that one, it means in this case: if your musician
gets run over by a bus. More likely, though, is "girl trouble" or some
such thing, with musicians (yes I actually heard this excuse).

**As discussed here: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1402

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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