Reading Reaction - Sequencestration

Now this article was interesting. While the primary focus was how to make MIDI more humanized for use in the educational settings, I saw in it something slightly different: taking the inherent limitations of MIDI and turning them into strengths.

The biggest weakness of MIDI is constancy: it always sounds the same, given a particular MIDI player. However, this also gives one, as a sequencer, a great deal of control over the sound. Sequencestration looks at this from the point of view of sound quality. One can mix and blend any of a huge set of consistent sounds together and get different results. With enough determination, one could even create one's own midi samples for use.

The article also talks about "humanizing" MIDIs, either through manual playing, or a humanize option(something I have not personally encountered). The manual playing is nice as long as no one needs to read the score, as the computer will record all the variances literally in the notation.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that even these techniques will make MIDIs particularly desirable for student performance, but this sound mixing is certainly applicable to composition. Electronic sounds have become more and more important and composition, and even for composers not directly interested in composition, sound experimentation helps develop the ability to orchestrate well. Considering and experiencing some of the vast sound possibilities out there encourage composers to use instrumentation and orchestration as important compositional techniques, instead of relying only on the notes and rhythms on the score, as is often a problem with inexperienced and developing composers.