Black MIDI

Black MIDI is an internet-born style of composition in which piano music is written as MIDI data far beyond human performability, with note counts running from hundreds of thousands into the billions. Rendered by software and watched as much as heard, finished works appear on screen as near-solid black notation. The idiom grew from Japanese video-sharing culture in the late 2000s, where arrangers pushed arrangements of game and anime themes toward absurd density; communities such as the *Black MIDI Team* then treated rising note counts as a competitive frontier, exporting the practice worldwide through video platforms.