Are you curious about the different MIDI instruments you are listening to while searching for choral music? In the table below, you can listen to all the 128 instruments, both with a single voice and with as many as eight simultaneous voices. The song is "It was a lover and his lass", by Thomas Morley (the eight-voice SSAATTBB arrangement was made by myself). You can see the arrangement for many voices as a PDF file, here:
It was a lover and his lass - SSAATTBB
The sheet music is identical to the eight-voice MIDI files, except for that I have removed identical tones that ar sung simultaneously, to make it sound a little better. However, sometimes this does not help since some of the MIDI instruments simply can't handle tones at "extreme" frequencies (most often the low basso tones). Then, it sounds horrible!
Furthermore, different computers will render the same instrument in different ways. This depends on what type of sound card your computer have. (For example, on my old laptop, with no external speakers, the Voice instrument sounds very good, almost like real voices. However, when I listen to the same files at my new computer with good external speakers, it sounds awful, like bad wind instruments).
The MIDI instruments may be named slightly differently depending on which notation program that you use (if any). The numbering, however, should be consistent everywhere.
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Last modified: 2012-01-02 by Eva Toller
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