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Looper's Delight
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>If you want to learn some more about some midi alternatives and possible >future musical networking technologies try these: > >the ZIPI home page (actually the "what happened to zipi home page"): > http://cnmat.cnmat.berkeley.edu/ZIPI/ I still disagree with you, Kim. The good parts of ZIPI are its support for per-note effects and its performance; as I said before, transmit MIDI over some faster physical link, and multiplex it for more channels, and you've got all that. (Just send every note on its own channel.) [Ok, ZIPI's approach to pitches is a lot better.] Most of the rest of ZIPI seems poorly thought out to me. Odd/Even harmonic content? Isn't that a little overly specific? In general, ZIPI seemed obsessed with what I could characterize as: measure some quality at the controller, transmit that quality over the network, allow the receiver to determine how to reproduce that quality. That sounds totally _wrong_ to me. In reality, different sound sources are going to have different abilities. You _have_ to remap from one quality on the controller to a different quality on a sound source. In fact, this can be an enormous source of creativity. Given that you have to remap, and given that every controller provides special things, why even waste your time on "odd/even harmonic content"? Do like MIDI continuous controllers-- a large set of entirely unnamed "qualities", and then manufacturers evolve over time a common set of _controllable_ properties. The drive to "name" the qualities comes from the sound _sources_, not the controllers. Then the controller measures the qualities in the performance and determines how to remap that onto the known set of things. As far as I know, this works in MIDI. Of course MIDI is broken in terms of per-note things, and continuous versus just-at-note-start things; I just mean the notion of which-side-of-the-system is responsible for "defining" what qualities of sounds are "interesting". But none of the ZIPI docs seemed to provide a rationale for shifting this remapping onto the receiver, away from the controller. I didn't reply to your other mail on this subject 'cause I think we're off-topic, but while I'm here, I strongly disagree with your definition of "modern synthesis technology". The two mail-order catalogs I have handy seem to have one or two "analog modelling" synths, and all the rest are sample-playback. Keyboard's NAMM report lists quite a few faux-analog synths, but I don't remember seeing any of the "hot synthesis techniques" you've listed (analog is hardly new, it's just the digital emulation of it that is). Those things may be the bleeding edge in sound technology, and if that's what you really meant, that's fine. I thought you were saying the average everyday "modern synth" had all this capability nobody was touching because of MIDI. If you're saying instead that MIDI is crippling the ability to do newer next-generation synths... well, you're just bemoaning the fact that technological innovation is difficult in this industry, and I still tend to think that's not 'cause of MIDI, but because of the economic incentive to stick to the things everybody already knows (which we've already talked about to death as well). Sean