Disklavier

Good morning, everyone.

On Sep 12, 2006, at 1:53 AM, Richard Kerr wrote:

>
> Not very useful without the composer.

I determined the title information that was embedded into the P-e-C  
MIDI files.

Basically, we added 2 types of MIDI messages: (1) a Yamaha System  
Exclusive message that Yamaha instruments recognize and display and  
(2) a Sequence Name Meta Event that many sequencers, keyboards, and  
other devices recognize.

In the case of #2, we were limited to 32 characters. In the case of  
Mark III and earlier Disklaviers, we were also limited to 32  
characters (i.e. two lines of 16 characters each).

With these limitations in mind, I constructed title information  
consisting of piece name and artist name. In the case of #1, I put as  
much into the 32-character allotment as I could; in the case of #2, I  
essentially did the same thing except that I formatted it so that  
piece name information appears on the first line and artist name  
appears on the second line.

In some cases, the information was so crowded that I could not  
separate words with spaces and therefore separated words by their  
initial capital letters.

Since the competition is all about the young artists, I thought it  
important to associate the performer names with each MIDI file and  
therefore gave preference to the artists instead of to the composers.

The Mark IV, of course, can show even longer piece names. However,  
the data is just in a long, System Exclusive string. The information  
is not organized by categories (such as piece name, composer name,  
date of composition, artist, etc.). In addition, you cannot see the  
complete string at one time on the Mark IV Pocket Remote; it scrolls  
by horizontally. I could have lengthened the Yamaha SysEx message and  
included the composer name after the 32nd character, but the string  
would have looked awkward. Also, adding that information would not  
have assisted the objective of many Disklavier owners to have a  
database that was searchable by piece, composer, artist, etc.

Regards,
PianoBench