Tartarus

Tartarus is the Greek god of the deepest darkest pit of the underworld. I composed this piece in celebration of reaching 100 subscribers to my YouTube channel. Melodically, it doesn’t feel nearly as menacing as its name implies (turns out you need a little more than a minor key and a fast tempo to make something scary), but it more than makes up for it with its massive note count and heavy “crash points”.

When composing this Black MIDI, I distinctly remember testing it across all the computers I had access to to make sure that the levels of lag it caused when it was played as a “legit run” were perfectly optimised to make it impossible to “pass” before the song completed (but only barely so). So many sections received repeated adjustments to make them lag “just the right amount”, especially in the final A and B sections after the key change.

This was a resounding success, with the piece attracting many legit run attempts over the years, with PCs only becoming capable of passing the final crash with the release of AMD’s 5th-gen Ryzen processors (see this recording on a 5800X machine by Carlos SM compared to a previous attempt from when the MIDI was first released). It’s incredibly cool to see my creative work act as a measure of computational power increases over time.

Download

Please ensure you respect the HDSQ MIDI License if you intend to make use of my work.

Note that the download is in 7Zip format in order to improve compression ratios. If your system doesn’t support this format out-of-the-box (cough, cough, Windows), you may need to install a tool such as 7-Zip.