Making and playing MIDI?
Posted: Sun Oct 31, 2021 6:06 pm
Years ago I made an experimental SuperCard stack that played the midi note equivalents of words where the letters were from A to G, using the no-longer available midi support in QuickTime. Yes, it was somewhat bizarre, but it was a fun exercise – and thanks to that old QuickTime MIDI support it was pretty easy. :-/
Now I'm trying out an experiment which maps notes in a chord to RGB colours and builds up a soft wash-style overlay of colours, like multiple coloured spotlights shining on a wall, that are derived from the chord. Yeah, another oddball thing! (Don't worry, the notes are set manually by clicking different objects, not by attempting to have the stack listen to the notes themselves being played; I may be crazy but I'm not actually insane.) One end goal is to use these as colourising overlays in a music video, so there is a point to this – although yes, it's still odd.
What I really want to do is be able to play a simulation of whatever chord is being picked out, and I presume midi would be the best way to do that. I've looked at PaulDaMacMan's rather excellent LCB midi tools and got the sample .mid files to play in the demo stack. But what I'd really like to do is play specific notes on the fly, based on what's clicked.
I'd like to have one note play for the first click, then another note play as well with the second click, and so on, building up the chord. I've looked at the midi file format and all I've achieved is to wear a bald spot on my head from all the puzzled scratching!
Is there any resource anyone knows of that helps explain in simple terms how to write a midi file? Am I just going to make my head explode doing it like this?
Keith
Now I'm trying out an experiment which maps notes in a chord to RGB colours and builds up a soft wash-style overlay of colours, like multiple coloured spotlights shining on a wall, that are derived from the chord. Yeah, another oddball thing! (Don't worry, the notes are set manually by clicking different objects, not by attempting to have the stack listen to the notes themselves being played; I may be crazy but I'm not actually insane.) One end goal is to use these as colourising overlays in a music video, so there is a point to this – although yes, it's still odd.
What I really want to do is be able to play a simulation of whatever chord is being picked out, and I presume midi would be the best way to do that. I've looked at PaulDaMacMan's rather excellent LCB midi tools and got the sample .mid files to play in the demo stack. But what I'd really like to do is play specific notes on the fly, based on what's clicked.
I'd like to have one note play for the first click, then another note play as well with the second click, and so on, building up the chord. I've looked at the midi file format and all I've achieved is to wear a bald spot on my head from all the puzzled scratching!
Is there any resource anyone knows of that helps explain in simple terms how to write a midi file? Am I just going to make my head explode doing it like this?
Keith