social.noyu.me

There's 187MB of multimedia in that post, including 57 seperate media files. Our web server is very likely going to implode from us publishing this, if a lot of people do end up reading this. We ask for your patience in this matter!

This is, to be absolutely clear, not another one-day unedited manic rant. Writing this took almost 4 days, and we have proofread it more times than we can count, and we have tried our best to trim the fat (even if it's impossible), but it was, effectively, years in the making.

If you only ever read a single piece of long-form writing from us, please let it be this one. And do pace yourselves when reading it, because we had to pace ourselves when writing it.

We hope you enjoy it.

heheh. we have no intention of making any further content changes to the post (just fixing technical issues with the media embeds and misspellings, stuff like that), but last night we remembered we actually do know where people have heard the QY70 before, and it's a doozy:

@hikari I failed to pace myself (whatever I wanted to pace myself, I'm reading texts really fast, even my brain can't follow it...), but I absolutely enjoyed your post!!

btw, I found some errors:

* some FLAC files returns nginx 403 or 404 error page (e.g. "definitely better than in DirectMusic." part).
* "04PIANO.MID on the SC-8850's Piano 1 patch, as intended." audio file contains some quirks around 0:05, is it recording fault or actual hardware quirks?

@rinsuki The quirk at 0:05 is probably a recording fault, we would guess (it sounds like it, at least).

We fixed the one remaining 403 issue with the FLAC files (it's a very frustrating consequence of how Windows and Unix filesystems interact when copying files between computers… it's bitten us many times before), but we aren't aware of 404's, do you have examples?

@hikari Reading through it now :3

Found the way the synths were introduced as being almost entirely Roland and brain naturally did the "categories" = "genders" and this image formed of its own accord:

@hokaze hfsdkjfhdskjhf

@hikari Looking at the photo of the Yamaha PSR-350 and you're really not kidding about near-identical keyboards popping up in every decade, it's very nostalgic.

It probably wasn't that exact model, but I remember something near-identical to it from primary school - including the floppy drive and the Song - Style - Music Database - Voice text on the top

I think the keyboard I had (and eventually charity shop'd) as a kid was fairly similiar too, minus the floppy drive and with less instruments and settings; while the Yamaha keyboards at secondary school were a bit fancier, but also not something I really got much chance to use

I definitely remember class disruptions from the "DJ" button :P

@hokaze We were amazed at how similar the thing we bought was to whatever we used in school… not just the Portable Grand and DJ buttons and Mission: Impossible theme, but also like, the Yamaha Education Suite (Y.E.S.) and the screen with the permanent clefs and stave markings, and surely many other things too. Possibly even the screen colour, but it could have been un-backlit for all we know at this point.

@hikari Nice article, thanks! The link to 04PIANO.MID seems to 404?

@h0m54r huh, so it does. could've sworn we fixed that one already, so one wonders how that file could have disappeared… we'll fix it again in a few hours

@h0m54r oh my fucking god it's a case sensitivity issue aaaaaahahahaha this is how you know we wrote it on macOS and not Linux

@hikari 👀 givin this one a read

@hikari soooooooooo fucking sick. thanks for having your blogs as a feed ; instant subscribe.

thanks so much for taking the time to put this together, and double thanks for sharing it. so neat.

@dizzy replies like this make it all worth it; thank you very much!

@hikari@social.noyu.me
hello! nice post!
i wish the samples were longer though, im in transit so i have to wear headphones, and i cant listen to music because i want to listen to the samples, but the samples run out mid-way while im reading a section leading to lenghts of annoying silence

again, love the post though

@m we really do not recommend reading or attempting to listen if you have an unreliable internet connection and are on a phone. nothing should be cutting out mid-playback though, you need to refresh the page perhaps. you can also download the audio clips rather than streaming them perhaps

@m oh sorry we misunderstood. you want continuous background music i guess? idk, it's not our intention

@hikari@social.noyu.me
yes

oki :<

@hikari Oh hey, I recently got some MIDI gear. There's an electric guitar with MIDI out that was made for Rockband. The fretboard is conductive and the strings are scanned to make a little matrix. Pretty nifty!

@gudenau we own that guitar!!!!!! and someday need to write a post about it too

@hikari "The Fat Man on Game Audio" has an interesting story about General MIDI. A later revision of the standard eventually _did_ come to specify the dynamics of the different instruments, because once George Sanger got his hands on a second General MIDI card and tried The 7th Guest on it, he discovered it was completely unlistenable. The standard became "do whatever Sound Canvas does", and "Fat Labs" was founded to put his personal seal of approval on new cards. https://discuss.fringe.games/topic/15/episode-6-shawn-hargreaves-discussion-thread

@SpindleyQ ooooooh this sounds very interesting, we will have to check it out at some point. one related thing we're aware of is there's a mid-90's document on midi.org somewhere that basically discusses endless errata and implementation problems with general midi

@hikari i read this before bed and then i had a wonderful dream about general midi. the specifics are mostly faded from memory, but it was something to do with implementing direct music support for my synthesizer.

@aeva this is lovely thank you for telling us

@hikari this is extremely neat, although we seem to *really* have a tin ear and can't hear a difference between most of the examples

wonder how much "also trained on a yamaha psr (and are therefore used to the sound)" contributes to that?

definitely don't remember the "DJ" button

are these all sample-based synthesizers (other than the single FM example)?

@r yep, every last example is a ROMpler (except the software ones which are just “samplers”, the distinction becomes less meaningful in software)

@r we're not too surprised you can't hear the differences, because after a certain point we find we struggle to, too, especially when it's the same demo MIDI for all of them. you have to spend a lot of time listening to different things with a tone to be able to really hear how it differs from other tones