MIDI sharing project:

MIDI sharing - notation and instrumentation - 19/9/21

How can instrumentation change the character of a piece of music?

In this session we experimented with MIDI. Simply put, MIDI is a way of notating music. MIDI files contain numerical information that tells computers what notes to play, how loudly to play them and potentially much more. But there is no intrinsic sound quality when working with MIDI.

We each composed a short piece, using MIDI. While some chose to create instrumentations for reference during the process of composing with MIDI, others chose to compose using bland sounds.

Featuring work by: Ábel M.G.E. mistakeless and Eleanor F. Robertson

Here's Eleanor's piece with the sounds used during the composition process:

Now, here's the same piece with Abel's different instrumentation:

How do the two versions differ?

Let's move onto mistakeless' piece:

Here's Eleanor's instrumentation of the above piece:

And finally, Abel's piece:

Now, mistakeless' instrumentation of the same piece:

If you want to have a play around yourself, you can download the MIDI files here. The files may have low notes at the very beginning, these are dummy notes to help sync up the MIDI files.