Shitty MIDI is Pretty
02/02/2026
I saw One Battle After Another in the cinema in 2025, and I couldn’t help but notice that in the opening scene the strings in the score sounded very MIDI. Surely a film with a budget of 175 million could afford real strings. But actually, I thought it sounded cool nonetheless.
A similar thing I’ve noticed in recent pop albums, such as Lux by Rosalía, is that, even though they definitely have live session players fiddling away, there’s still MIDI being used. In the case of the Flaming Lips’ album The Soft Bulletin, they used MIDI orchestral sounds because they couldn’t afford a real orchestra. Had they known that this would eventually become an appealing sound, perhaps they would have had more confidence in their shitty sounds. One of the greatest film scores of the 2010s is Mica Levi’s Under the Skin, which uses some very fake-sounding strings on purpose. Similarly, Jerskin Fendrix’s score for Poor Things has sounds that could indeed be real instruments, but they’re so manipulated that they end up sounding fake, like a cello being pitch-shifted into a violin register.
The great thing about these examples is that they don’t appear to be trying to fool the audience into believing that the sounds are real (okay, perhaps that fake violin solo in Berghain had some people convinced). Instead, they’re using MIDI as a sound in its own right. I recently heard an orchestral arrangement of Angelo Badalamenti’s music from Twin Peaks. It sounded good, but there’s something missing when we don’t hear those artificial strings that dominate the entire score.
There are many R&B and hip-hop songs from the 90s and 2000s that have fake MIDI strings, and honestly, it’s a vibe.
If I could be Freud for a moment, I’d say that there are real sounds (live instruments) and electronic sounds (synths), and MIDI instruments occupy the space in between—not quite human and not quite artificial. This seems like an ideal voice for our music today. For many, this sound is completely undesirable because it doesn’t quite commit to sounding real, resulting in auditory processed cheese slices. But we’ve arrived at a stage where we’ve discovered a fondness for the sonic potential of these sounds.
The Mysterious Double-Edged Sword of Music
Supposedly the Ancient Greeks used to play music to welcome the sun each day.
In June of 2025, I spent a short amount of time at a hospital in Melbourne. I was there to have conversations with patients about music. I asked them about their background with music and what kind of music they enjoyed listening to while in hospital.
I spoke to one jolly woman while she was having cream applied to her scalp for a cold cap - a procedure that reduces blood flow to follicles and can sometimes help reduce hair loss during chemotherapy. Giddy, she brightly listed all of her favourite music that brings her warmth and comfort, including Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Charlie Parker records. An avid patron of music, she explained to me that she sometimes gets her granddaughter to sneak her out to concerts during therapy because, as she put it, “you gotta enjoy yourself.”
It’s very difficult for me to think of music as anything other than deeply spiritual. What is it for? Why does it give you goosebumps? Why does it make you dance? Why do dementia patients often forget everything except the music they heard 40 years ago? Why does music sometimes help with movement in people with Parkinson’s disease? Why do most spiritual traditions have some form of singing or chanting?
The most powerful insight I had while speaking to hospital patients came in the intensive care unit. A significant number of patients broke my heart by telling me that they were actively avoiding listening to music. This wasn’t because they found it annoying or didn’t want extra noise; it was because they didn’t want the beauty of music to accompany them through the most difficult moments of their lives. For these patients, the unexplainable beauty of music was causing them pain. This is the mysterious double-edged sword of music.
I spoke to one woman in the ICU, another lifelong patron of the arts and concertgoer, who revealed to me that she had written instructions stating that during her final moments, her family and nurses were not permitted to play music around her. When we asked her why, her eyes filled with tears and she said very simply, “If I’m listening to music, I won’t be able to let go of this life.”
I don’t know what music is, or why it’s here, or why we have such a visceral response to it. But for what it’s worth, we should take good care of it, treat it with respect, and thank it for the mysterious beauty that it is—and which we will likely never fully understand.
Callum Ó'Reilly January 2026
These interviews with hospital patients were for the purpose of creating a piece for Flinders Quartet and the Hush Foundation which could be listened to by patients, nurses, doctors and hospital staff. The piece is below.