Uploaded September 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

---

alt. title: "fear inoculum but it's transmitted through two 56k dial-up modems"
i wonder if youtube's content ID will pick this up... (EDIT: it did)
__________________________________________________

I've always wondered how these MIDI converters actually work. Turns out basically, it takes a spectrogram image of the source audio, map the frequencies to the correct MIDI notes, and spit out the audible portions of the audio (the "hot" portions of the image) as, well, MIDI notes. This video here explains this better:
youtube.com/watch?v=4eJU7rGwrvk

So with that knowledge in mind, if we take a MIDI-converted sample and play it back in sine waves, we should get the original audio back, right? Well, kinda.

MIDI doesn't exactly have the level of detail that normal analog audio has, and in this case, I had to cut off notes in the upper frequencies post-conversion (anything above B5/C6) otherwise the MIDI just ends up being really noisy to listen to. Except at the very beginning of the song, because that's where the high-pitched tuning fork (i guess??) sounds are.

MIDI also isn't exactly stereo. So to get a stereo conversion going, I split the song audio into 2 separate mono files, converted them separately, then pieced both conversions back to stereo.

Also yeah, I love this song. Waited 13 years for new Tool, and we finally got one haha. Anyway, I just thought this was an interesting experiment, and wanted to share the result. :p

Hope you enjoyed~