MIDI Messages Research Articles

Designing Musical Instruments for the Browser

Native Web technologies provide great potential for musical expression. We introduce two JavaScript libraries towards this end: Gibberish.js, providing heavily optimized audio DSP, and Interface.js, a GUI toolkit that works with mouse, touch, and motion events. Together they provide a complete system for defining musical instruments that can be used in both desktop and mobile Web browsers. Interface.js also enables control of remote synthesis applications via a server application that translates the socket protocol used by Web interfaces into both MIDI and OSC messages. We have incorporated these libraries into the creative coding environment Gibber, where we provide mapping abstractions that enable users to create digital musical instruments in as little as a single line of code. They can then be published to a central database, enabling new instruments to be created, distributed, and run entirely in the browser.

MIDI-compatible hearing device

The hearing device is MIDI-compatible, wherein MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. The hearing device can be adapted to communicating and/or loading and/or storing and/or interpreting and/or generating data compliant with the MIDI Protocol, also referred to as MIDI messages. Acknowledge sounds of the hearing device an be controlled by MIDI data, or music can be played to a user of the hearing device based on MIDI data. The hearing device can be a hearing aid, a headphone, an earphone, a hearing protection device, a communication device or the like.

Dancing with Music: An Approach to Choreography Synthesis Corresponding with Music Based on 3D Spring Model

This paper proposed an approach to automatic motion generation of 3D spring model corresponding with music. Music factors, which include basic information and Kansei information, could be extracted from MIDI message. According to the congruency of Kansei information between music and motion, several connection functions between motion and music were applied. Instead of designing animation in every scene, a sequence of motion-controllers parameters, which can finish a set of motions, are generated through a synthesis algorithm. A prototype system was developed for evaluation and it was confirmed that the appreciators were relatively satisfied with the generated animation based on music.

Enhanced digital music glove

Most of electronic music works are created off line using studio editing techniques and hand-crafted computed-generated or sequence control streams [M. Goldstein, Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1998 IEEE International Conference, Vol. 2, pp. 1076–1079]. In this paper a digital music glove (DMG) system playing musical scores in real time is implemented. Furthermore, the present commercial product, TouchGlove, connected to an I-CubeX Digitizer [http://www.infusionsystems.com/products] becomes a finger tip controller for drum machines, but this DMG, by selecting any instrument in the sound card through the interface with the player can be used for many other instruments including the drums. Additionally, this new system controls the pitch, duration, chorus, reverberation, and velocity of sound by updating the pitch wheel change message, polyphonic aftertouch, and channel pressure according to the MIDI file generation. The computer, according to the status of the fingers and foot switches, generates the sound signals and sends them to the speaker systems through the application C++ program and MIDI message. [Work supported by Korean Ministry of Communication and Information.]

Gen: A Lisp Music Environment

Gen is a MIDI Lisp environment, running under Windows, for music composition and real-time processing of input MIDI streams. It was inspired by the Lisp musical software line represented by environments such as Common Music (Taube 1991). Gen focuses on topics related to algorithmic composition; it implements stochastic and deterministic models for music generation. Gen also includes built-in functions to process incoming MIDI messages. Its input-output capabilities can be extended with user-defined Lisp functions. The first part of this article describes Gen's compositional tools. The second part addresses the input processing functions.

Design of a pipelined music synthesizer based on the wavetable method

This paper describes a design of a music synthesizer based on the wavetable method which synthesizes waveforms by sampling, looping, and filtering stored sound data of an instrument. When compared to conventional wavetable music synthesizers supporting 32 polyphony, the designed synthesizer, SWS-64, supports 64 polyphony by employing a 3-stage pipeline architecture. For the functional verification of the SWS-64, we simulated the sound of each instrument from MIDI messages using the SWS-64 model described in C. By applying the top-down design approach, the SWS-64 was synthesized from the RT-level model described in VHDL by Synopsys Design Analyzer and Compass. The post-layout simulation results show that the SWS-64 operates at a clock speed of 33.9 MHz under the worst conditions.

A touch sensitive dance floor/MIDI controller

A prototype MIDI Dance Surface has been developed which is capable of transmitting precise position coordinates, velocity, and pressure information in the form of standard MIDI messages. The surface consists of a large number of force sensing resistors (FSRs) which are attached to heavy duty plastic sheeting and covered with polyethylene foam. The sheets may either be placed on top of or beneath a standard Marley Dance floor. The FSRs are typically arranged in a grid with 16 columns (left to right) and 4 rows (front to back), which results in a 16 ft. square dance surface with 64 1×4 ft. velocity and pressure sensitive regions, each of which is assigned a separate input channel of a Voltage to MIDI Interface Box which has 64 analog inputs, plus MIDI Out. The MIDI Box incorporates a Motorola MC68HC11 microprocessor and can be programmed to convert input/output analog signals to/from any desired MIDI messages, on multiple MIDI channels. Hence, used in conjunction with an ‘‘intelligent’’ external MIDI processing system, it is ideal for use in interactive dance compositions in which one or more dancers can affect both the music and lighting by the nature of their movements and by their precise position(s) on the surface.

Real‐time concurrent pascal music

Abstract Real‐Time Concurrent PascalMusic is a musical language which allows algorithmic composition and interaction during live performances. It consists of the standard Pascal language extended with a set of primitives which can manage musical and acoustic events. RTCPM is based on the idea that a running program/composition issues MIDI messages which feed synthesizers, and that the overall musical result depends on the computation of predefined algorithms which are also controlled in real time by incoming data that a performer issues using MIDI controllers. The concurrency feature which allows many processes to be activated at the same time is the vital mechanism that makes PascalMusic work.

Voyetra Sequencer Plus Gold for IBM PCs

Interval, Chord, and Scale Identity exercises use a similar approach and have similar options. The only difference is that instead of playing back the example, the user selects the correct answer from a list on screen. All the exercises functioned flawlessly. Spending a few hours with Ear revealed that some of my ear-training skills have grown rusty. Working with Ear, I was able to improve those deficiencies in a remarkably short time. In fact, I find only three things to criticize about Ear. From time to time, Ear leaves graphical artifacts on the screen. For example, when it removes a dialogue box overlaid on the on-screen keyboard, a small amount of the box may not be erased, blocking part of a key. It would be useful to be able to interrupt the exercises and simply play on the MIDI controller and have Ear route the input straight through to the MIDI Out port. For example, the user might wish to play pairs of major and minor sixths back to back, to impress the difference on the ear. Yet the only time the MIDI controller is active is when Ear is waiting for response to an exercise. Finally, although it appeared at first that Ear would run properly in a maximized window under Microsoft Windows 3.0, that was not the case. The software somehow garbles the MIDI data sent to and received from the MIDI interface, resulting in doubled notes, stuck notes, and a variety of garbled MIDI messages. I used Ear with the Music Quest MQX-32m interface, and Ear scrambled the contents of the interface's registers, requiring a complete power-down to restore the interface's integrity. While there is no representation in its advertising or documentation that Ear is Windows-compliant, I was surprised that a program with no sequencing, synchronization, or other timing-related functions would wreak such havoc on the system if run under Windows. I remember ear-training classes as the least appealing, most tedious of all my music classes. While Ear cannot be expected to substitute for a class leader in a music education environment, it eliminates much of the tedium caused by the limitations of a group situation. It could be of equal value as part of a comprehensive secondary or college-level ear-training program, or as a refresher course for any musician whose aural skills need improvement. Play It By Ear is priced at $99.95. For additional information, contact Ibis Software, 90 New Montgomery, Suite 820, San Francisco, California 94105, USA, telephone (415) 546-1917, FAX (415)543-0346.