MIDI & site music

Reading the file...

Everything above was drawn from the file itself, parsed in your browser. Nothing here is a recording. The notes are instructions and the sound is being generated from oscillators as you listen, which is roughly what a 1996 sound card was doing, badly.

The page could not start that on its own, and that is the ending

In 1997 the music began before you had done anything. Here is the incantation, copied off a real GeoCities page:

<EMBED SRC="Pardon_Me.mid" LOOP=TRUE AUTOSTART=TRUE HIDDEN=TRUE>
<NOEMBED><BGSOUND SRC="Pardon_Me.mid" LOOP=INFINITE></NOEMBED>
</EMBED>

Two vendors, two tags, two loop keywords, one song. <EMBED> is Netscape's plugin tag driving LiveAudio. <BGSOUND> is Microsoft's, IE only, doing the identical job with a different vocabulary: LOOP=INFINITE rather than LOOP=TRUE. <NOEMBED> holds what a browser shows when it ignores <EMBED>, so IE fell through to the tag inside. The author shipped both and let the browser decide. Nobody designed this. It accreted.

Try it. The button below does exactly what AUTOSTART=TRUE did, and then reports what your browser actually did about it.

Attempt AUTOSTART=TRUE

That is not this page being polite. It is not allowed. The Web Audio specification says an audio context will always begin in the suspended state and may only start once the page has what the spec calls sticky activation, meaning you did something first. Chrome has gated it since version 71. This plate is forced to render a play button, and that forcing is the end of the story it is telling.

Hide it, or put an operating system in the middle of a sentence

Authors had two options and no third. HIDDEN=TRUE above is the first. This is the second, from another GeoCities page, verbatim:

<FONT SIZE=6 FACE="BAUM">Come into <embed src="bard.mid" width=140 height=40 autostart="true" ALIGN="TOP"> Talon's Nest</FONT>

width=140 height=40 is the LiveAudio control panel, and the tag sits between two words. It rendered roughly like this, in the middle of the running text:

Come into ▶❙❙■ Talon's Nest

A chunk of operating system chrome, sitting in a sentence as though it were a word. Given those two choices, hiding won, and that is why a generation of people remember the web as a place that suddenly started playing music at them.

What a song weighed

Twenty tracks in 7,673 bytes. The median of these four is around 22 KB, and one of them is 69 KB, so a whole song in 30 KB is fair and a whole song in 8 KB is also true, but always under 30 KB is not. A single JPEG on the same page usually outweighed the music.

Why this plate plays Bach and Joplin and not the ones it is about

A MIDI file carries two independent copyright layers: the composition, and the sequence itself, which is a fixation of a series of sounds and can be protected on its own.

So Bach dying in 1750 does not make a 1997 hobbyist's Bach MIDI free. The distinction is whether a person made creative choices: the instruments, their relative volumes, the pitches, the timing. A file mechanically generated from a score has thin claim to originality. A hand-sequenced performance is a derivative work with its own author, and that author is usually anonymous and unreachable.

This is not theoretical. One of the most prolific Bach sequencers of the 1990s documented someone taking his files, adjusting the tempi, presenting them as their own, registering copyright in the United States, and then threatening sites that would not carry them. The song was public domain and the recording of it was not, which is the argument streaming has been having ever since.

Every one of the six pieces at the top of this page is from the Mutopia Project, generated from typeset source with LilyPond rather than performed by a person, and marked Public Domain on its own catalog record: composition, edition and sequence. That is the entire reason the playlist is a Bach aria and five Joplin rags. Ragtime is not what was playing on GeoCities, and this plate is not going to pretend otherwise for atmosphere. These are simply the pieces that can honestly sit on a public page.

The four files in the table above are the ones this plate is actually about, and not one of them can be played here, by this site or by anybody else, without tracing an anonymous sequencer from 1997 and the rightsholder of whatever they were arranging. They stay in the reference folder. That gap, between what the playlist can offer and what the subject actually was, is the clearest thing on this page.