Re: Arbitrary MIDI

[Cam]

On 2020-02-23 10:17 a.m., David Kastrup wrote:
> Cam <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > > On 2020-02-22 9:22 p.m., David Kastrup wrote:
> > > > Cam <address@hidden> writes:
> > > >
> > > > > Is there any way to inject arbitrary bytes of data into the stream of
> > > > > generated MIDI?
> > > > No.
> > > >
> > > > > There are times this would be convenient.
> > > > You'll probably need a Midi sequencer or processor to get this done
> > > > with
> > > > LilyPond output.
> >
> >
> >
> > David,
> >
> > Thanks for the quick reply. At least your answer is clear and unequivocal :)
> >
> > I will work around.
>
> The Midi backend is pure C++, not accessible to Scheme programming and
> not even using Scheme garbage collection.  That would be good to change
> some day, but that's a long-term perspective without currently ongoing
> or even started work, and without a Scheme way into _any_ Midi,
> generating arbitrary Midi bytes just does not appear to make a lot of
> sense as they could not be usefully serialised.
>
> One could conceive of a few special-cased "performers" that could pick
> up data of certain kinds (generic controllers or stuff?): that kind of
> thing might actually work without opening up Midi to Scheme in general.
>
> But at the current point of time, there is nothing implemented, and more
> importantly there is absolutely nothing you could do without going to
> C++ first.

Thanks for the additional info.

Although it would be slightly more convenient to be able to embed some 
arbitrary MIDI in the Lilypond source, I can work around without great 
difficulty. The point is to control some non-musical gear which responds to 
MIDI messages. I invoke Lilypond, from within a Python program, to compile 
short musical phrases which are then glued together and merged to create a 
single MIDI output file.

Cheers

Cam