Have you ever been listening to a normal song and thought, "I wish this normal song
had 280 million notes and took up 1.1 terabytes of data and was literally unplayable on any
computer?" Of course, you're only human.
MIDI is a shared digital language that lets electronic instruments communicate with computers,
invented in the early 1980s to provide a technical standard in the burgeoning field of electronic music.
MIDI used to sound like this.
Now MIDI is literally at the core of all pop music -- it's how keyboards and laptops and
samplers make Katy Perry records. It's how your ring tone works. It's how you use a tiny
plastic guitar to play the "Freebird" solo on Expert. It's basically digital music air.
It is in everything.
Black MIDI is a sequenced MIDI file so dense with notes, it literally just appears to be
jet black. So instead of sounding like this -
It sounds like this -
Uploaded on February 6th, 2011, that piece of hypnotic mayhem from kakakakaito1998 is
the first-ever Black MIDI. Although these files were being traded online as early as
2009 in Japan, kakakakaito1998 an original "blacker." Because naturally his subculture
has bad-ass lingo.
These songs are created -- or "blacked" as the bad-ass lingo goes -- by initially layering
multiple MIDI files on top of each other, shortening the notes, and then presumably
offering some sacrifice to the pagan Gods of yore because seriously this shit is insane
and no one who does it seems eager to divulge the secret sauce.
The visual side of black MIDI is as mesmerizing as the notes themselves -- of which that song
has 7.67 million. There is an element of technical braggadocio and one ups-manship to not only
the number of notes, but the presentation. The description of that video is simply "My
graphics card has enough memory to run this without invisible notes :D."
Why? Why? Why? Bullet hell.
The most popular blackened MIDIs all originate with the Touhou project, a one-man enterprise
that has seen the release of 21 bullet hell games in as many years. The quintessential
Japanese shoot 'em ups, Touhou games feature an unending reign of enemy fire and big tunes.
That, for example, is a 2003 Touhou game called Perfect Cherry Blossom. And this is "Necrofantasia,"
a popular song from Perfect Cherry Blossom.
In fact, the 10 largest black MIDIs, according to the Impossible Music Wiki's leaderboard,
are all Touhou project songs. But it's YouTube so of course someone did "What Does the Fox
Say."
But in the end, the best part of any of these songs is when the computer just gives up and
barfs pure black.
That was Jingle Bells.
When Adrian Chen wrote about black MIDI for Gawker, he joked that we should expect Rihanna
to be stealing it within three months. What do you think? Could this blow up all weirdly
mainstream like sea punk? Like us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe for
new episodes of This Exists every week. Happy blacking.