Chapter 9 Further Reading

Everything below is real and findable by searching title and author. Editions and links drift, so names beat URLs — and library copies count. Virtual-instrument reviews go stale in a season; the programming craft in these sources doesn't.

Beginner

  • The MIDI Association's free online resources. The industry body that maintains the MIDI specification publishes free introductory tutorials, plain-language explainers on MIDI 2.0 and MPE, and the specification documents themselves (free with registration). When you want the actual answer about what CC11 does or how a Note On message is built, go to the source instead of a forum argument.
  • Sound on Sound magazine's free online archive. Decades of manufacturer-independent articles on MIDI programming, virtual-instrument technique, and controller buying advice. Search the archive for its MIDI workshop pieces — and bookmark the long-running Synth Secrets series, which is your head start on Chapter 14.
  • Dan Charnas, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla (MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A biography that's secretly the most readable book ever written about grid time versus human time — how one producer turned deliberate timing deviation into a feel that changed hip-hop and R&B. This chapter's stiff-versus-human axis told as a life story, and the perfect runway into Chapter 13's groove work.
  • Appendix E (DAW Translation Guide) and Appendix I (Resource Directory) in this book. Appendix E maps this chapter's controls — quantize strength, swing, humanize, velocity tools — onto every major DAW's actual menu names; Appendix I collects the communities and learning resources that stay current after print.

Intermediate

  • Paul Gilreath, The Guide to MIDI Orchestration (Focal Press/Routledge, 4th edition). The standard text Case Study 2 promised — the book working mockup artists actually hand to newcomers. Library anatomy, velocity layers, CC riding, ensemble spreads, section-by-section programming idioms: the full toll for the far slope of the uncanny valley.
  • Andrea Pejrolo and Richard DeRosa, Acoustic and MIDI Orchestration for the Contemporary Composer (Focal Press/Routledge). The other standard mockup text, stronger on the writing side — what real sections play and why — which is exactly the "rewrite for bodies" step that no plugin performs for you.
  • David Miles Huber, The MIDI Manual (Routledge, 4th edition). The protocol end to end in working-studio language: channels, controller maps, sync, and a clear treatment of MIDI 2.0. The reference to keep nearby when the sidebar makes you curious about what's actually in the messages.
  • VI-Control. The long-running online forum where working virtual-instrument composers — film, TV, games, trailers — trade exactly the techniques from Case Study 2, CC lane by CC lane: legato-patch behavior, ensemble-spread recipes, library comparisons, mockup critiques. The community half of the case study's promise. Read more than you post for the first month.

Advanced

  • David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (MIT Press). The science underneath this chapter's prediction-machine block: how brains forecast music, and what happens emotionally when the forecast succeeds, fails, or gets played with. The deep version of why structured deviation reads as a person and jitter reads as a malfunction.
  • The expressive-performance research literature. Decades of published studies document that skilled players systematically stretch timing and dynamics with phrase structure — search for Bruno Repp's piano-timing studies and the KTH rule system for musical performance (the overview paper by Friberg, Bresin, and Sundberg is straightforward to find). Evidence that humanization-as-intention isn't a metaphor: the deviations really are structured, and the structures have been measured.
  • Samuel Adler, The Study of Orchestration (W. W. Norton). The conservatory standard on what real instruments and sections can do — ranges, bowings, breath, combinations — with recorded examples. Case Study 2's costliest step was rewriting piano-shaped parts for bodies; this is where that musicianship comes from.
  • The MIDI 2.0 specification documents (the MIDI Association). Surprisingly readable as specifications go: universal MIDI packets, 32-bit controllers, per-note expression, capability negotiation. The primary source on where the protocol is heading, best read after the chapter sidebar.

For Educators

  • Run Case Study 1 as a live lab. One pianist (a student volunteer or a colleague from the music department), one weighted controller, any DAW: record the played pass against the typed clip, then project the piano roll and have students find the deviations before you name them. The Clip A/Clip B autopsy converts skeptics faster than any lecture; Exercise C1 gives every student the solo version as homework, and Exercise D1 (the deviation spec) works as the assessment.
  • The General MIDI ghost demo. Render one MIDI file through a 1990s-style General MIDI soundbank, then through a modern sampled instrument, levels matched. Five minutes, two playbacks, and "MIDI sounds bad" dies in the room — students hear that the protocol was never the sound. Pairs naturally with the sidebar as assigned reading.
  • ThinkSpace Education and Guy Michelmore's free video lessons. A working media-composition educator demonstrating orchestration and mockup craft on camera — CC riding, layering, idiomatic writing — in a format that drops cleanly into a flipped-classroom week on this chapter.
  • The companion volume, The Physics of Music. Its Chapter 5 (psychoacoustics) underpins this chapter's entrainment and prediction material, its Chapter 7 (timbre and Fourier analysis) explains the velocity-brightness physics, and its Chapter 10 (electronic sound and synthesis) is the science ahead of this book's Chapter 14.