WEBVTT

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Afternoon everybody, as that part of the slide says, my name is Steve, as that part

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of the slide says, I'm a bit of a geek.

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If we've all turned up to the correct bloom, this is a talk about midi-life performing.

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Yeah, hopefully we have turned up to the white bloom, it's been a long weekend.

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Thanks to Shimei.

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So, I hope the next 15, 20 minutes or so, I'm going to be telling what this library is,

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what it does, how it works, and the sort of things that you can actually do with it.

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There's no point in actually using any software unless it's useful.

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So, before I start, I should probably do the who am I?

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One of I done to deserve a place on this stage, always the slide should be called the ego slide.

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This is where the speaker blags about themselves for 10 minutes, while you always think,

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is there enough of death room I can get to?

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Well, I'm a geek, I'm a general purpose, mess around with anything.

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I'm a very bad pianist.

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keyboard, can I can fix it?

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I like fixing every single note.

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I'm a control freak like that.

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I'm a bad performer, but I'm okay as a composer, because I can fix it in post.

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And I am a very big open source advocate.

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I've been at the first end for the last 26 years.

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I've spoken here, you know, I thought, is anyone seen me speak here before?

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And you came back.

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You're better than I thought.

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So, I am basically winging it right now.

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I'm not a composer, but I try to be.

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And open source software lets me be that composer, I thought I should be.

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If I was born in another decade, I would be Chopin.

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I would love to have been Chopin.

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But all this means is ignore everything I say, because what's important is not what's on that slide.

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What's important is what is not on that slide.

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I'm not professional.

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I'm just making this up as I go along.

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Which means if I can do this, so can you?

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So what am I doing?

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Well, I'm doing this live performance thing.

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And I call it a midi live performance.

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It's not live coding.

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It's about taking midi and put streams.

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It's about processing that midi stream, and then outputting something from that midi stream.

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I like live coding thing.

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I enjoy watching people do live coding, but it's not what I do.

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I said, I'm a control freak.

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I want to have control over every single note.

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If a lossity of every note, every accent, I want control of it.

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So there is no way I will do a live performance.

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But I'm perfectly happy with people who will.

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I take the midi in.

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I throw some midi out.

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These are some of the examples that I'm going to demonstrate.

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Links are all at the end.

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You don't have to copy anything down.

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It's not a test.

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So the first thing is, well, how do we get input?

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Bring in the library, open a port, and then process it.

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And that's what you get.

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That's midi input.

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That's midi data.

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Has anyone looked at midi data in their life and saw this and going,

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so what is 1, 4, 4?

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It's no Tom.

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You see that, everyone?

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He's the nerd, not me.

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That's no Tom, yeah?

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It is.

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But it's not quite as simple as that.

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Because 1, 4, 4 is no Tom on channel 1, 0.

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60 is the note.

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It's that one.

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100 is the velocity, the volume of that note.

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Well, it turns out that a velocity of 0

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is exactly the same as note off, which means

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every single piece of code that ever processes midi

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has to have a stupid exception saying,

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hey, it's no Tom, unless the volume is 0, then it's no Tom.

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It is annoying, but you have to do it,

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which is why I'm kind of happy that I have a library that

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does it for me.

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So if I can find my window, this here, for example, there we go.

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This is the midi dump example, so when I play things on here,

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this is what's coming through the keyboard.

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And you can see everything is saying no Tom, no Tom,

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because I've had to munch the data saying, well,

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it came through as no Tom with 0.

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And then we have to change it to note off, which is frustrating.

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But what can you do?

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This midi format was created in 1981, 1982.

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Back when computers really didn't have any kind of processing

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or memory.

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So you can understand why they said,

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investors have one message for two different things.

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And then all the programmers can worry about it for the next 50 years.

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So that's one of the sort of things you can do with it.

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You take the data when you process it,

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and you just dump that out to the stream.

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This is what actually comes out.

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What comes out of the keyboard?

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It's 144, 48, 100.

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But it then gets unpacked to saying, well, it's a no Tom.

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It is C4, it's 100, 100 volume, it's on this channel.

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Things that you could actually use,

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and then start processing in some way.

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Those are the examples I showed you.

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That's me playing a senior major chord.

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And then you've got the output.

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The input comes in.

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It goes to the machine.

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You can munch that data anywhere you like.

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And then you throw it back out to midi somehow.

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I'm using fluid synth on this for the demonstration

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that home might have a proper synthesizer.

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It is a nice big thing.

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It's like this.

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It looks great.

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I'm thinking, have I actually ensured my house for enough money

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to have this synthesizer?

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It quite literally costs more than my job.

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Although when you consider the fact that I'm unemployed, that's not difficult.

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So I use the use sense for this demonstration.

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I'm using something on the laptop.

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So the frequency does all the timing for you.

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Which I don't know if anyone notices on the notes.

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This project is written in JavaScript,

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because it is the one true language.

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OK, some people are laughing, some people are nervously laughing.

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I'm not quite sure if I've alienated the room or not at this point.

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JavaScript is really good at demonstrating

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how to write a really weird language.

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I'm using my words carefully here,

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because I'm confident in a couple of months with Douglas Cotford.

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And I don't want to run a finger guy.

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So if you're watching Douglas, hello.

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It's a mess.

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JavaScript is a mess.

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And the timing is awful.

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But as long as you don't care about the timing,

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I eat your drama, it will be fine.

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OK, I can see the drama in the room.

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Are you telling me about two minutes?

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It's left or not.

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Because it's not quite right, you've got a pulse in JavaScript,

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which is not accurate enough.

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Tink everything to the platform, it will be fine.

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And that's my approach for this.

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I'm not trying to build the best thing ever.

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I'm just trying to use something that I can experiment with

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and just build up MIDI things as I go along.

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So here's an example.

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You bring in the library, you set the outputs,

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you build up the sequencer, and you key messages

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for I use the word letter Q for Qing, I thought.

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Q is a very nice English word.

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Q, you, E, you, E.

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Quite literally four of those letters are redundant.

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The only letter we need in the word Q is the letter Q.

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So I'm just Qing messages for them saying no to on note.

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And that's all I'm doing,

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because then I can do a thing with it.

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And this is an example of the echo program.

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Every time an input comes through from the keyboard,

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it looks at it and goes, OK, well, then place some notes.

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And if the, you know, it's computers are willing,

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maybe we can do a live demo that demonstrates that.

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And you can hear the echo on that.

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Now, if anyone's old enough, oh, yeah.

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You ain't seen nothing yet.

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That's quite effective.

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And I was, anyone here, old enough to remember,

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Brian May and Queen back in the 1970s.

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I can see the old people nodding and saying,

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please don't talk about me.

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He had a, he had a, he had a loop of pedal.

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And he would create and target our solos based on our looping,

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things like that.

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So like, OK, there's a thing you can do with that.

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So because it's code, you can actually do anything you want with that.

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So that is, are we on the right thing here?

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So if I do one note, that's not the right window.

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That's, that's fine.

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Am I on the right tab now?

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Nope.

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Where's my cursor gone?

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There we go.

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So if I do that, there we go echo.

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It's code.

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I just decided to take the pitch by an octave.

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Almost no effort.

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But there's an idea there that you can think, I could use this.

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And anyone that's, listen, there's black horse on the cherry tree.

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Anyone know that song?

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Woohoo.

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Yeah, that one.

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What do you track?

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You could basically recreate that in 30 seconds if you had talent,

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which I don't, which is why I'm on stage.

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So that's one of the examples, it's basically echo.

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Another one I did was strummer.

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Again, because I have no talent, I can't play guitar.

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But it's okay, because what I can do instead.

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I take the input.

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I look at the notes I'm playing.

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It says, oh, you're playing a C chord, you're playing a D chord.

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What would a guitarist do in this situation?

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And the answer is, well, a guitarist would

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stay saying, look at me.

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What it also does is work out that chord,

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or a guitar, would be a series of different notes

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than what I'm playing down here.

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So it takes those notes, it changes them,

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and then it plays each of them with a very slight time difference.

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So it feels like you're actually strumming the instrument.

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And of course, you don't need to do it with an actual guitar sound.

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You could do it with any kind of sound you like.

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And you can see here, it's like, oh, yeah, I've detected a G chord

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to a B7 chord and everything else.

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So you've got a lot of scope for playing some really weird effects on this.

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Another one is the looper.

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Oh, and I've got to do a live demo.

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This is going to go in badly, isn't it?

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Let's see if the live demo is actually going to work.

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So the live demo is not going to work, so that's fine.

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Oh, there we go.

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Let's cancel that, that's not a good sign.

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What is it with the curse of these days?

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No, not two.

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Three?

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Okay, never mind, we might just skip that.

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Oh, I've got a four, what's four, do?

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Oh, we've got some sounds.

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You've got a person going to hear.

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Tins.

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So I can set the channel the mutes from this half and the notes played on this half.

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Yes, not quite craft work, is it?

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Boom, boom, chuck.

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But that's a general idea.

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You can feed things in, you'll loop the things.

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And as a fun bit, I put this chord thing in.

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So this is telling you what all the various stats are doing at this point.

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So these are the channels which are muted if I unmute those.

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Can I unmute those?

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There we go.

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Track three, mode, erase notes.

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If shift, quantizing, mute, and next chord is that one.

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So if you've ever had one of those Yamaha keyboards from the 1980s and had the auto accompaniment on it,

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that's what it's doing.

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But it means you're just experiment.

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And after a while, it becomes quite hypnotic.

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And you think, actually, maybe I have a musician after all.

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But clearly not.

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So with that in mind, the demo almost worked.

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I've also used, is anyone seen Terry Wiley's in C?

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I know you have Steve, and a couple of others as well.

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It might come as a shop to some of you, but I don't have many friends.

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When you laugh, and that's where you go are.

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Let's try that again.

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Okay, edit that bit out of the video.

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It might come as a surprise to you, but I don't have many friends.

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Patronizing lots.

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So I wanted to create Terry Wiley's in C.

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Basically, there's 50 odd bars of music, and each musician plays each bar as they feel like

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it.

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They move on to the next bar when they feel like it.

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Well, I didn't have enough friends to do this.

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So I used that library to create an entire version of the composition with all these

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very instruments.

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So I was quite literally a conductor.

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I was saying, okay, synthesize that.

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Now you go.

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Now you pause.

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Now you go to the next bit.

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I spent a quiet.

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This is an hours worth of music.

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It just keeps going on and on.

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It's brilliant.

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Have I got an hour to play the whole thing?

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No, okay.

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I did in C, and I recorded that, and I thought, that's quite a good version.

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I'm going to do another version.

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Well, I'm going to record every single stem, and then manipulate every stem individually.

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And I went, and I went from doing in C to being in C++.

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And this is the only conference in the world where that joke is understood.

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I did this at the Royal Albert Hall, and I just went.

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So the stuff is there.

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The library works.

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It does its thing.

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Ultimately, in the end, I quite like it.

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I like messing around.

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I like messing around.

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I like messing around.

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I like messing around.

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I like messing around.

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I like messing around.

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I'm just seeing what happens.

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So maybe some of you will find something interesting there as well.

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So that's all for me.

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I'll let me update the scorecard.

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Okay, that's 31 talks given this conference.

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I've probably done my time.

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Thank you.

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Good night.

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Thank you.