[LAU] MIDI NOTE ON/OFF Messages - reducing data

[Fons Adriaensen]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 01:36:25PM +0100, Crypto wrote:

> There are many instruments that in real life never need a manual action to 
> stop their sound, for example most if not all percussion instruments and 
> drums. For these, sound can "only" be triggered and then just plays, there is 
> no way to stop it, apart maybe from rigorously damping it.

Damping notes on a percussion instrument is quite
a normal thing to do...

Apart from this, MIDI is very keyboard-centric,
and it shows in all sorts of ways. For example,
on any channel, note-on events are identified
only by their note number, so you can't have
e.g. two independent events of the same frequenccy.

I guess many synhts that have limitied polyphony
use the note-off event in the voice assignment
algorithm - if not the patch has to tell it when
a note has ended and the voice can be re-used. 
So they may depend on it.

Ciao,

-- 
FA

Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica
Parma, Italia

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