Impossible music

If you know black music, chances are you've never run into black MIDI. Which isn't black music played on a synth: it's a style born around 2009 in Japan, in the NicoNico communities that grew around Touhou Project, one of the hardest shoot-'em-ups ever written.

The game has a soundtrack in the 8-bit console style of the eighties, back when hardware limits forced everything out of a single synthesiser, all in the same timbre. Think of it as playing every part of a track at once on a piano: drums, guitars, vocals, strings.

From there somebody started rebuilding those themes in MIDI, adding notes. Then more. Then more again. The piece always cited as the origin is a remix of Final Savage Sister Flandre S by the collective COOL&CREATE, and a black MIDI track today holds notes in the millions: the videos show shapes literally drawn in music, because MIDI lends itself to that. Print the score and you get a black sheet of paper. Hence the name.

And there it is — a perfect example of music impossible to perform, unless you're made of silicon.

But why write music nobody can play?

There's a precedent, and it's a century older. If you've seen Westworld you remember the saloon piano playing by itself, grinding out old-school arrangements of very modern songs: that's a player piano, and it reads a perforated roll. Those holes are the position and duration of the notes — a MIDI file made of paper, eighty years early.

The player piano, developed in the mid-nineteenth century and a fixture of the twenties, was also the instrument of one of the maddest composers of the twentieth century: Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote some fifty Studies for it until his death in 1997. Nearly all of them are canons.

A canon is a melody repeated at regular intervals — Frère Jacques is a canon. The overlapping voices can move at different speeds: usually one is twice or half the other. Nancarrow went considerably further, with ratios like 4:5, or 12:16:19:20. Hard enough to write down, never mind play.

Then he stopped using whole numbers. How do you feel about a 2:√2 canon, where the second voice enters at the square root of the first one's tempo? In Study No. 40 the two parts stand in the ratio between e and π, two irrationals set against each other: by definition, neither voice ever meets the other again. And in 41 he went further still, building the canon on ratios of cube roots — π's included.

Something similar had already happened in Italy, without a piano at all. On 11 March 1913 Luigi Russolo signed The Art of Noises and then built his intonarumori, because no instrument existed that could play the music in his head. He toured them until 1921, from Modena to Paris and London. At the Milan premiere the audience responded with their fists, which in its way is a review.

And today? The most famous black MIDI piece is Rush E by Sheet Music Boss, from 2018: half the internet has spent years trying to play it for real, with results somewhere between the heroic and the medical. Meanwhile the genre lent its name to an English band, black midi, who stopped indefinitely in 2024 after three records — impossible too, apparently.

But why any of this? Because music is art, and art is unpredictable and irrational. Take the golden ratio: nature is full of it, and the greats have all tried to work it into their own field, music included. That's the pleasure of it — pushing past every available frame. Narrowing the circle of what can't be reached.

It remains true that "impossible" and "listenable" rarely get along.

_Study No. 7 played by Thomas Adès and Gloria Cheng: two actual pianists, four hands, on a score written for a machine._