'The most impressive improvements in identifying speech from sine-wave signals is observed after presenting people with the untransformed signal first and then asking them to identify the speech within the sine-wave replica of that same signal,' he added. An artist did this with an actual piano back in 2009, and the idea can be visualized in this YouTube video: Baio then used a free online MIDI to MP3 converter to turn them back into an MP3 file, played by a grand piano 'font.'īasically a piano is playing Carey's vocal notes, the backing vocals, the shimmering drums, the bass, the guitar, the Christmas bells, and everything else in that song, very very quickly.
In this case, the MIDI converter is essentially flattening all of the instruments and vocals into one sound track and is recording the sound frequencies of these notes and spitting them out. 'It's recording the fact you hit these notes at this specific time, but it's not recording the sound wave performance of those notes.'įor this reason, MIDI files are really small and were popular in the early days of the web as a way of putting music on websites. 'MIDI is a description of the music-there's nothing in MIDI that says 'play this note in this way,' it says 'here's the note to play-it's a C-note, and play it using this type of instrument,'' Baio told me.
