I'm not trying to defend Midi I just think that floats are over kill and
really not worth sacrificing bandwidth for eg channels, amount of control
info, timing resolution. A replacement for midi should be robust, cheap
(yes sorry) and easy to set up (sorry again). When I mean abstract I mean
like in object-oriented programming, there are places where different forms
of control belong, one of my criticism of csound is it lack of support for
the abstraction of control. Don't give me this patronising 'real
musician'/'Classically trained musician' nonsense 16 bit, 65536 levels, is
beyond any musicians level of control, yes you can hear two identical
sounds beat when separated by less than .2 cents, but do you really want to
specify that their pitches are 10537.6317 cents and 10537.6434 cents or
that one is 0.0117 cents sharp to the other. Midi should not be designed to
make up for deficiencies in sound module design.

Nathan Day
nathand@senet.com.au

Nathan Day wrote:
> sounds beat when separated by less than .2 cents, but do you really want to
> specify that their pitches are 10537.6317 cents and 10537.6434 cents or
> that one is 0.0117 cents sharp to the other.

Actually I'd prefer it in hertz, but yes I do; my large-scale
structure may depend on the phase relationships among oscillators.
This particular list has probably seen enough discussion of MIDI, so
I'll hold off on your other points -- the price of bandwidth and the
proper layering of abstraction.  Just be careful what you trade off as
"obviously of no use", ok? :-)

oh, and on other folk's comments like:
> Jeez I guess all the volumes of music Bach wrote for harpsicord and
> clavicord alone are crude.

I don't think anybody's saying that MIDI is unacceptable across the
board -- it works fine for Bach keyboard works.  It was, after all,
designed by keyboardists for keyboardists.  But it does break down in
other areas.

-- 
     Eli Brandt  |  eli+@cs.cmu.edu  |  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/