This is a personal list of recommended links dealing with MIDI, an Industry Standard for transmitting Musical Data. Last Link Check: 2010-01-10
... by Christian Banasik (Freeware for Atari computers) - MIDI is a platform-independent protocol, so you can record the output of this beautiful program directly into your PC or Mac sequencer. At last this worked in my studio. AFSTS is especially good in designing homogenous sound structures within user-given time brackets.
... by David Pannett (Shareware for Win3.11 and
higher) - The best algorithmic simulation of jazz and/or new music rhythm
structures I found.
... by Lars Kindermann (Freeware for Win3.11 and
higher)- Easy-to-use application. Its structure-generating capabilities are
very limited, but this didn't bother me because of the playful concept. Good
for beginners in algorithmic composition.
... by Laurie Spiegel (Shareware for Mac/Atari/Amiga computers) - One can use Music Mouse intuitively without any specialist knowledge except how to move a computer mouse around the screen. The musical output always sounds "interesting", but if you don't work on it really hard, you will get bored very soon. The diffculty here is not to produce musical structures that make "sense", but to compose something out of all the material the mouse is "suggesting".
... by Russian software company NTONYX (Shareware for Win98SE and higher) has an original approach to generating music: It processes a given SMF by transforming its metric, rhyhtmic and harmonic structure, thus outputting a new SMF. NTONYX says nothing about the underlying heuristic (?) algorithms, but my experience with the progam's output indicates they may be not that ingenious. Especially when the input SMF is rather complex, Style Morpher simplifies its rhythmic and harmonic content in a quite predictable way. But may be you have to go the other way round... Apart from this, the program's full version is absurdly expensive ($49,00).
... by Paul Whalley (Shareware for Win95 and higher) - Be patient!
It takes some time to get something interesting out of it, but once you got
the concept, its capability of creating melodic variations on a user-given
scale is impressing. Unfortunately, Paul's homepage disappeared recently, so
you have to google for the software.
A good
place to look for more MIDI-based algorithmic composition tools is the
"Computer Aided Composition" section of Hitsquad's Shareware Music Machine
(but don't forget to turn on your WebFilter, the ads are annoying!).
If you are using
an ancient Atari computer (the ideal MIDI platform!), you must have a look at
Tim Conrardy's Atari MIDI World. Tim's a REAL expert in detecting kewl
algorithmic composition programs from the 1980s (his list comprises e. g.
Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse, Clarence Barlow's Autobusk or Christian
Banasik's AFSTS).
Piet van Oostrum's small, but brilliant DOS utility converts SMFs to ASCII-Text and vice versa. You can edit the ASCIIfied SMF easily in a text editor (Notepad e.g.). This is especially useful for entering copyright or title data in the file header.
These tiny programs by Günter Nagler convert SMFs to / from Formats 0, 1 or 2, recognize a file's format etc. There's also a utility to insert a count in at the beginning of an SMF.
Jeff Glatt's small windows program works like mf2t, but also provides some basic "repair" functions, e.g. muting stuck notes :-) Its ASCII output is much more detailed than that of mf2t, which, in my opinion, makes it rather hard to edit :-(
Jamie O'Connell made this free MIDI Patch Cable driver. He describes it as following: "MIDI Yoke is used to connect any Windows MIDI application outputs to any other applications inputs. The MIDI data stream is passed directly from output to input [...] This allows you to connect the MIDI output from one program to the MIDI input of a different program. MIDI Yoke can be configured to provide a varying number of MIDI Ports (from 1 to 16). In addition, each port allows multiple opens of both input and outputs: up to 4 openings per port." For me, MIDI Yoke works fine under Windows XP to route Winamp's MIDI output to Vienna Ensemble :-)
Mark Fontana's DOS-based (sic!) software is still unbeatable when it comes to processing Format 0 SMFs containing Keyboard Music on a GS Device. It runs in Fullscreen mode and has a timeless design that doesn't suck.
Malaysian programmer Fong Chee Keat released this software in the late 90s. It is a Windows MIDI player with a remarkably rich display, which is especially good for watching controller movements in realtime. It works fine under Windows 98 with MIDI Files for SC88Pro.
Christian Banasik (Germany) - He developed AFSTS, a MIDI-based Algorithmic Film Sound Track System for ATARI ST. Read more about AFSTS here.
Clarence
Barlow (USA) - Read an article
in Paul A. R. Timmermanns' online journal P-ART. Be sure to check out
Barlow's MIDI-based real-time pitch and rhythm generator AUTOBUSK for ATARI
computers. Read an
essay on AUTOBUSK by German composer Georg Hajdu (PDF, in German). Listen
to an extensive interview Barlow gave to Kalvos
& Damian's New Music Bazaar in 1997 (in Real Audio, unfortunately):
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Barlow did film music and a sound
installation with AUTOBUSK. Watch a one-hour interview
with Jeremy Haladyna (2007). Read a 2007 interview
with Bob Gilmore.
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz (USA) - A very prolific composer living in Vermont. A lot of his work can be downloaded as SMFs.
Laurie
Spiegel - The New-York-based composer
programmed the legendary Music
Mouse, an Intelligent MIDI Instrument for Mac/Amiga/Atari.