I like how people were complaining about pop music in the Middle Ages.
Interestingly, early mediaeval choral music had far more of a resemblance to Middle Eastern and Jewish liturgical music than it did to even Renaissance secular music, let alone Baroque or Classical symphonic music. It was based on studies of Greek and Levantine practice going back hundreds of years and used some very unusual passing tones, some what we would now call microtonal, but the harmonies were all in fourths, fifths, ninths and octaves, if there were much harmony at all.
It looks like the packet format itself doesn't make any assumptions about the tuning (the notes are number 0-127 from lowest to highest), but since most MIDI devices are keyboards, I can see why anything but 12-tone would be hard to find.
There is a Dutch open source computer program called Scala which allows you to reformat the tuning of a keyboard to anything that you might desire, but you still have to use the keys that you have. There are, of course, many alternate keyboard formats, including George Secor and Adrian Fokker's universal models which have been adapted for MIDI use after years of analogue use, and some cool keyboard-less controller options, but MIDI itself is a fairly limited format.
For point of reference, Fokker's 31-tone organ is one of the coolest looking things ever:
Now, mind you, Fokker was trying to get every note in 31-EDO over several octave onto a single organ keyboard. One could easily put 17 or 19 notes onto a regular keyboard with little change or expansion.
Maybe you, but mostly I keep this level of nerdery to the parts of the Internet where everyone who I am talking to already knows what I am talking about. And really, this sort of thing is pretty basic compared to the full-on weirdness of temperament theory.
Of course, I'm thinking of situations where there isn't a keyboard at all, i.e. modeling a non-keyboard instrument, or dumping raw notes from a CPU into a sound generator.
Oh, that might be a slightly different case. I know very well how common refretted guitars are, particularly ones that use small but weird tunings like 14 or 16, so I have to wonder.
The 1740 one is deliciously ironic on several levels - viola da gamba killed the guitar, eh? - but it does make me sad that we don't hear that family of stringed instruments much any more outside of historical reconstructions. The same goes for the theorbo, which is a lovely thing.
Pepe Deluxé has a viola da gamba on one (possibly two) tracks in [i]Queen of the Wave[/i]. Unfortunately the arrangements on those tracks are so dense that I can't pick out most of the individual instruments.
Unless we're talking about how David Thomas described one of the tones that Allen Ravenstine got out of his synthesiser as like a huge metal can full of bees, or talking about a metal group or album entitled Colony Collapse Disorder (which should exist if it doesn't already).
Anaconda is roughly two minutes too long and gets boring after a few listens
yes i am once again disappointed with pop music
I have not heard it, but what little I have heard of the "big summer jams" has been an endless parade of half-baked blandness and irritation with little exception.
Anaconda is roughly two minutes too long and gets boring after a few listens
yes i am once again disappointed with pop music
I have not heard it, but what little I have heard of the "big summer jams" has been an endless parade of half-baked blandness and irritation with little exception.
I've found it weird that there hasn't really been a "Rolling in the Deep" or a "Get Lucky" this year.
There's usually at least one song like that every year that everyone can get behind, regardless of their respective tastes.
I guess that just goes to show how insufferably bland, even by usual standards, the pop charts are at the moment.
"Happy" was decent, but there's really nothing to say about it. It is a solid throwback number, lyrically upbeat and fun to listen and especially to dance to, but it's a little too silly and repetitive to be anything ground-breaking.
I really liked "Superbass" and what I heard of her early fire-spitting rap stuff, but Nicki Minaj hasn't impressed me in a long while. Kinda sad, that, because she does have a delightfully insane sense of humour.
I haven't heard it yet. There is a difference between "bland" and "boring," though. A really odd thing can outstay its welcome if it's not executed well enough or is overused.
On a completely different note, Eitanora are an experimental drone/folk/improv outfit that shares a number of members with the notorious black metal/noise group Venowl. It's lovely stuff by some rather affable people who happen to also make monstrous shrieking ear poison (not in a bad way).
Comments
What that stand for? BEES
yes i am once again disappointed with pop music
(Which applies to both the song and its respective video)
Calling Anaconda "bland" is weird to me though.
it seems like an ideal soundtrack for sloppy making out behaviours