2017-12-02:
Black MIDI

You might have heard of the MIDI format. It's short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and among other things, it can be used to describe melodies. In 2009, some people in Japan started to use the format to compose what they called Black MIDI songs – which contain melodies with absurdly many individual notes, often in the millions.

The name stems from the fact that, if you would display the song in classical music notation, the sheet would look completely black.

Some notable examples:

• Tetris Theme A remix makes a nice, slow progression into absurdity
• Necrofantasia, one of the best-known Black MIDI songs, remixed and built upon many times. This version consists of 53 million notes
• Pi consists of very pretty patterns, and contains, of course, 3.14 million notes

Fun fact: The MIDI standard allows up to about 93 trillion notes in one song, and people have actually composed songs which reach this limit, but due to their sheer size, they cannot to be played back or recorded on current computers.