General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

Black MIDI

Black MIDI is a genre of music made from MIDI files packed with enormous numbers of notes, so many that the score, displayed in standard two-stave notation, appears as a solid mass of black noteheads; the name refers to that appearance. Composers in the scene, who call themselves "blackers," arrange songs, most often from Japanese video games and anime, into arrangements that ordinary computers struggle to play back in real time¹^•². The genre began in Japan around 2009 on the video platform Nico Nico Douga and spread through YouTube, China, Korea, and later Bilibili into a global, competitive community²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Definition	MIDI compositions with note counts so dense that standard notation looks solid black; composers are called "blackers"¹
Scale	An average pop song counts around one thousand notes; a typical Black MIDI track is several millions²
Origin	Japan, around 2009, on Nico Nico Douga; the first black MIDI was based on "U.N. Owen Was Her?" from the Touhou Project²^•⁴
Western spread	2011, via a YouTube upload by Kakakakaito1998; John L. Sinneslöschen's "Red Zone" black MIDI followed on October 3, 2011⁴^•¹
Extreme densities	Some pieces average more than 60,000 notes a second, with total counts in the millions or billions⁵
Namesake band	The English rock band black midi, formed in 2017, shares its name with the genre⁶

Origins

Black MIDI started in Japan around 2009, when users on the video platform Nico Nico Douga began publishing remixes built from a single virtual grand piano playing a very high number of notes, at first hundreds of thousands and later dozens of millions². The first black MIDI is traced to the uploader Shirasagi Yukki @ Kuro Yuki Gohan and was based on "U.N. Owen Was Her?", the theme of the extra boss level in the Touhou Project, a vertically scrolling Japanese shooter series; it was uploaded to Nico Nico Douga in 2009⁴. Japanese video game music, and Touhou in particular, has remained iconic to the genre⁴.

Spread. The genre took off in the West in 2011, when the YouTuber Kakakakaito1998 uploaded a video featuring a MIDI track with a high volume of notes; within its first three years the video gained over 100,000 views¹. On October 3, 2011, the YouTuber John L. Sinneslöschen uploaded a black MIDI of "Red Zone" from the Japanese music rhythm game Beatmania IIDC, and on August 11, 2012, Ryan Moua published a black MIDI version of "Necrofantasia" from Touhou¹. By the 2010s the practice had spread to YouTube and later Bilibili, forming a global community³.

Technique and aesthetics

The basic method is to fill the score with very short notes while keeping the main melody in front. Some note triggers cluster on low pitches to create beats, some form long notes resembling string synths, and some stack into very fast arpeggios imitating the fake polyphony of early monophonic game soundtracks; others exist purely for visual effect, drawing patterns, images, or words when played in visualization software². Despite the density, arrangements typically preserve a recognizable melody surrounded by rapid ostinati (repeatedly recurring musical figures), dense arpeggios, cluster chords, and hyperactive drum programming, often drawing on J-pop, anime, and video-game source material³.

Note counts function as the genre's high scores. They are proudly stated in video titles and descriptions and rise year by year, a central part of the scene's competitiveness². At the most extreme densities, the playback system's ability to represent the information breaks down and the sound erupts into digital distortion; blackers refer to their tunes as "impossible music" because the scores cannot be played by hand on a real piano⁵. The stated goal, in one formulation, is to approach this processing failure without actually crossing the line⁴.

Playback and tools

Black MIDI is usually consumed as screen recordings on YouTube, where the notes appear as colorful bars falling onto a keyboard in programs such as Synthesia, a piano-training program in the style of Guitar Hero; this makes the genre an audiovisual form as much as a musical one².

Performance limits. Ordinary MIDI players and synthesizers lag or crash on extreme files, so the community maintains purpose-built tools. Piano From Above, originally by Brian Pantano, became the most commonly used visual player, and forks of it added performance optimizations⁷. Piano-FX-Pro, a fork rebuilt on DirectX 11, renders notes with GPU-side expansion using custom HLSL shaders and a parser with a tournament tree for O(log T) track merging, and is aimed at files with millions to billions of notes⁸. The Black MIDI Developers organization maintains xsynth, a synthesizer described as playing 8,000 voices or more in real time using SIMD and multithreading, and wasabi, a player described as the fastest and most memory efficient⁹. For video, the community's guides recommend the renderers Zenith, by Arduano, and Ultralight MIDI Player, by PipiraMine¹⁰.

Because real-time playback of the largest files is impractical, some creators record the MIDI program slowed down and speed the footage up in a video editor; Jason Nguyen, who runs the major distribution channel Gingeas, described his videos as edited for no lag in exactly this way⁴.

Community

The scene is organized around teams, groups of blackers who collaborate on tracks and take roles from blackening songs to producing and hosting videos. English-speaking blackers formed their own team, BMT (Black MIDI Team), and community reference sites such as the Guide to Black MIDI and the Impossible Music Wiki codified the practice⁴. Sharing is customary: project files and downloads are commonly made available so others can feature the work in their own videos, and community members feature other blackers' work on their channels¹¹. Individual creators maintain archives of their output; the blacker BLEEDING EDGE MONOTONE, for example, publishes a public archive of his released works and is known for the track LIGHTSTORM, listed at 22 million notes¹²^•¹³.

Precedents and reception

The idea of music impossible for human hands predates the genre. Conlon Nancarrow's twentieth-century compositions for mechanical player piano, punched into piano rolls, created extremely complex works in the same unplayable spirit, and the genre is also compared to the tracker software of the 1980s and 1990s demo scene, which likewise treated hardware limits as a challenge². The community itself disputes the lineage: the Guide to Black MIDI states that references to Nancarrow and piano rolls are too deep and that Black MIDI's origins must be found in the digital MIDI music world⁴.

Commentators have placed the genre in a broader musical context. The electronic artist Holly Herndon likened the sound she heard to the early twentieth-century cluster chords of Charles Ives, or to an absurdist critique, deliberate or not, of the virtuosity demanded by the "new complexity" music of composers like Brian Ferneyhough⁵. Academic writing on the genre describes its "aesthetic of impossibility": conventional MIDI qualities such as low data volume and operational reliability are taken to absurdity by the sheer quantity of processed signals¹⁴.

The band black midi

An English experimental rock band shares the genre's name. black midi formed in 2017 when Geordie Greep, Cameron Picton, drummer Morgan Simpson, and guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin were studying at the Brit School in London, released three studio albums on Rough Trade, and announced an indefinite hiatus in August 2024⁶. In a Japanese interview, the band was asked about the Black MIDI genre, whose origins are traced to Nico Nico Douga, indicating the name's resonance in Japan¹⁵.

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026