An Introduction to the Seaboard RISE: 1.3 - MIDI/Equator/RISE Video Lecture | Introduction to Seaboard Rise: Advance Music Production

let me take a moment to try and give you
a few ways to wrap your head around the
different pieces of technology we'll be
using
I'd like to talk about how they're
connected to each other and also how
they're connected to our history I think
this is the stuff that is largely
missing from tutorials usually they get
right to the how but leave out the why
which i think is a hugely important part
of understanding something so here I go
MIDI stands for musical instrument
digital interface which sounds very
technical truthfully MIDI is and can be
complicated in the same way that things
like your smartphone electricity and the
internet are complicated and possibly
equal to the amount that we take them
for granted
many people use MIDI without knowing
anything about how it works behind the
scenes but in order to really get the
most out of your rise in equator you're
gonna want to understand a few things
about how it works
control surfaces like the rise send
detailed information to our hardware and
software synths in the form of ones and
zeros much like English where words are
divided into nouns verbs and so on MIDI
sends groupings of ones and zeroes which
tell a musical story each grouping or
word tells a sound source something
specific to perform how hard the hidden
note which pitch to play the duration of
that note everything about that print
performance transmitted in binary code
see boards have the capability of
sending so much MIDI information that
it's basically a different language
which we refer to as MPE
multi-dimensional polyphonic expressive
data a colleague of mine used the
metaphor of a highly developed alien
species which in this instance would be
the Seaboard making contact with a
primitive life-form the MIDI protocol
the C board has the capability of
speaking Middies language but it's also
capable of using it to have much more
elaborate conversations and hold several
of them simultaneously let's use another
metaphor to try and describe the
relationship between rise equator and
MPE data this is a variation on
something I read from the opening of a
book titled interactive composition
which I think works extremely well
imagine a violin the wooden body of a
violin is a resonant chamber which
produces sound when used in conjunction
with a bow which controls creates and
shaped those sounds so in this instance
a cleaner is the resonant chamber which
creates the sound source and rise is the
bow which controls it playing a violin
takes
a lot of technique and practice because
there are so many ways to shape the
sound the varying pressure of the bow
gives us attack volume swells and
release how long we bow dictates the
length of each note and precise
placement of the finger tips dictate
pitch and a wavering of them creates a
vibrato effect it's almost uncanny how
these exact statements are true of their
eyes and as far as how MPE fits into all
this
think of MPE is the written score of a
performance it has all the information
of which notes on which staves were
played in which part of each bar for how
long with a full range of dynamic
markings and slurs except in this case
it's even more than that the MPE score
from a seaboard performance would have
markings such as pitch Bend and things
like cutoff or resonance adjustments
which we don't traditionally see
dictated outside of automation lanes in
digital audio workstations one of the
most powerful functionalities of MIDI
and MPE
is that you can capture these
performances and their information
inside of a DAW which has the utmost
flexibility for you to edit afterwards
sound sources meet high-level
expressivity meets my digital sequencer
and boom it's a composers dream come
true so much power so much flexibility
and perhaps most importantly so much
creativity now that we've looked at this
from a few angles and gotten some
context let's dig deeper into what the
five dimensions of touch are each of
them relates to a specific gesture on
the rise and are inherently connected to
equator