Creating a new item as a child of '/hdsq/tau'.
Tau, The Song with 6.28318 Million Notes
Tau is my greatest Black MIDI, and is regarded by some to be the best Black MIDI ever. It was composed over the course of an entire year, with over 250 hours spent working on it.
It was created in reference to TSMB2’s Pi (The Song with 3.1415 million notes), and was released on Tau day of 2018. Within the composition, I hid many references to other well-known Black MIDIs, and challenged viewers to find all of them. At the end of the competition, fellow blacker Everither had found just under 35% of the references.
The history of the project
This composition originally started as a collaboration with the notorious blacker Emex (creator of the Nuker series, YouTube channel now deleted). They created the original opening motif (B F# E F# A F# E F# B) ascending motif (B C# D F# B^ C# D F#) and chord progression, which I expanded from there. After my contributions, they lost interest in the project, and so I continued working on it by myself. Over the next few hundred hours, I ended up changing almost the entire project.
I think I realised I had created something truly special when I composed the 6/8 section of the piece. I remember doing this without any audio, since I had forgotten my headphones that day. I spent so much time trying to create a 6/8 adaptation of the main melody, but ended up getting the chords wrong due to the lack of audio. I then developed that section into what is now my favourite part of the composition.
I’m sure you can tell from the final version number (2.5.9) that a huge amount of time was spent revising the composition. I tried to use semantic versioning for the version numbers, and so the major version bump happened when I made major tweaks to the ending of the piece (completely redoing the key change). The minor version bumps happened when I made significant changes to melodic elements, and the patch version bumps happened whenever I made small adjustments for audio balancing or art improvements.
If you want to get a sense of how the project developed over time, I have also shared MIDI files of some earlier versions of the project. If I find more versions within my archives, I will share those as well.
The musical references
Embedded within the project are over 50 references to my favourite Black MIDIs. Some of these are complete counter melodies, whereas others are just small choices in artwork, chords or stylistic decisions. Unfortunately, I lost the file where I listed all of the references, but here are the ones that Everither spotted as a part of the reference competition, as well as any others I remember.
| Reference | Timestamp in Tau |
|---|---|
| Unbounded by TSMB2 (similar melody design) | |
| Pi by TSMB2 (high-pitched root note chop) | 0:20 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (drum sequence feel) | 0:34 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (descending melodic sequence) | 1:09 |
| The Destroyer by TSMB2 (sweeping note art) | 1:43 |
| Electroman Adventures by MusiMasta (tempo variation and arpeggios) | 2:18 |
| Epitome of an Enigma by Zarhym Raider (chords and rhythm, with time signature altered from 6/4 to 4+3/4) | 2:20 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (melody) | 2:25 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (number note art) | 2:25 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (Morse code message) | 2:25 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (binary-encoded ASCII message) | 2:25 |
| Voyage 1969 by ScubDomino (2/4 bar and accompanying note art) | 2:44 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (black-key note art) | 2:47 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (swipe note art) | 2:56 |
| Shanghai Teahouse v2 by Thinker-AI (arpeggio swipe sound effect) | 2:57 |
| Unbounded 2 by TSMB2 (descending chromatic sequence) | 3:07 |
| Luttuoso (unreleased composition by me) | 3:46 |
| Fractal Images by TSMB2 | 4:21 |
| Battle Against a True Hero by ScubDomino (delay effect) | 4:29 |
| Megalovania by EpreTroll (countermelody) | 4:37 |
| Arecibo by TSMB2 (countermelody) | 4:52 |
| Edge of the Seas by Aiyui (ascending chord progression) | 5:03 |
| The Destroyer by TSMB2 (post-crash echo sound effect) | 5:27 |
| Manifest by TSMB2 (descending scale ending) | 6:11 |
| Epitome of an Enigma by Zarhym Raider (ending arpeggios) | 6:15 |
| Pi by TSMB2 (note count reference, song duration) | 6:28 |
I’ll add more references to this table as I remember more.
Downloads
Please ensure you respect the HDSQ MIDI License if you intend to make use of my work.
Note that the downloads are 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.