MIDI, OSC, & Noise Music

MIDI is a protocol/hardware device that allows instruments and computers to communicate with each other. Open Sounds Control (OSC) is the communication of sound to devices through binary numbers and other methods such as strings and floating point numbers. Both OSC and MIDI are message protocols that are hardware transport independent. OSC is a more modern approach to digital sound, and offers more flexibility and control than MIDI.  Despite this, MIDI is still the industry standard for professional recorded music. When carried on Ethernet, MIDI bits move at the same data rate as OSC bits carried on Ethernet, because the data rate is a factor of the transport, not the protocol. In terms of throughput, MIDI can actually have better throughput than OSC because it takes fewer bytes to make common MIDI messages than it does to make comparable OSC messages.

Noise music is classified to encompass multiple discrete genres of sound composition involving the categories of both noise and music. It can feature acoustically or electronically generated noise, and both traditional and unconventional musical instruments. These artists have incorporated noise music in their work: Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Cornelius Cardew, Theatre of Eternal Music, Rhys Chatham, Ryoji Ikeda, Survival Research Laboratories, Whitehouse, Cabaret Voltaire, and Psychic TV.