After reading both articles this week, I have found MIDI files extremely flexible and useful for students, educators, and musicians. For example, the readings touched on how transposition is no problem with MIDI, allowing one to transpose entire songs at once with a single MIDI message. Also, a majority of sequencing programs allow one to edit individual or groups of notes in either MIDI tracks or audio tracks. Since a MIDI performance consists of individual MIDI events, students can easily edit or delete a single or selected grouping of notes. Also, electronic keyboards and other types of MIDI instruments make MIDI input with notation and sequencing software easy and much less time consuming.
If, however, you are looking for musically expressive, realistic sound quality, digital-audio files are much more practical. Recording rehearsals, concerts, audition CDs, and documenting performance progress all depend on genuine, instrumental sound that cannot be captured in a MIDI file. Even the most technically advanced instrumental synthesizers cannot effectively reproduce the subtle nuances of a live performance from an accomplished musician. If your students want 'the real deal', recording a live performance as digital audio is the best choice. The only drawback is that the resulting track may be more difficult to edit, though it will sound far more realistic. Moreover, it is important to note that if students want to compose hip-hop, techno, or other forms of electronic music that uses digitally recorded, looped, and processed sound clips from existing digital-audio recordings, digital-audio files must be utilized.
While I won't comment much on the technical side of how MIDI files work, my overall, general impression of determining whether to use MIDI or digital-audio files is quite simple: if you are mostly concerned with the structure of a piece of music and want to easily edit/transpose on a highly detailed level, MIDI is the way to go. If the sound itself and musicality are the #1 priority, digital-audio is the better choice.
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It's easy to get lost in the universe of MIDI terms and jargon. It is a priceless resource and a significant advancement in the development of sound creation. Nevertheless, for the purposes of what I plan on doing with MIDI as an educator and composer, the I found the technical side of the article a little dense.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your statement about the inability of synthesizers to recreate a live performance. It gets close, but a good ear can almost always tell when a synthesized sound is being used.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you concerning the limitations of MIDI. Forcing students to repeatedly listen to and perform with unmusical, robotic MIDI files encourages them ultimately to become unmusical, robotic players.
ReplyDeleteStructure is an interesting idea though, specifically because most players in the school setting have no understanding of it beyond what they intuitively realize. They are often just told to play certain notes a certain way and that's that. I personally strongly believe in understanding the music that is performed, and scrolling MIDI scores, as you say, could be useful here. After all, if we as educators are going to expect our students to make independent and intelligent musical decisions, we must teach them to understand music, not just play by instruction and rote.