User:Sebastians/rwrm/111012/description

(Sadly, LMB doesn't work in Ubuntu out of the box as additional plugins for playing midi files are needed)

What

Last Midi Background (LMB) is a website that I created in 2009. At its core, it is an archive of links pointing to websites that use midi background music. These websites are predominantly abandoned leftovers from the web 1.0 era (last update 1999...), often with personal content, for example describing the author's hobby. Additional to using midi background music, they are often quite colorful and use animated gifs. In general, their style could be described as "multimedia dirt style".

The LMB website itself is an internet-radio, that provides an interface to these websites. It plays a continuous stream of midi music while showing a space shuttle that is flying through a stream of images. The space shuttle is made of simple elements like an html table, a submit button, animated gifs etc. It acts as the radio player, displaying the song's filename, the website's title, as well as providing the user with "stop", "next", and a link to the website to which the user is, kind of, listening. The images, through which the space shuttle is flying, are taken from the website whose background song is being played. When a song has finished playing and the next one starts, images from the new website start to appear.

LMB accepts the unstable nature of the web, only "hotlinking" to the midis and gifs, thus slowly fading away as do the websites that constitute its content.

It is possible (and encouraged) to submit more websites through a little submission form.

http://www.kingcosmonaut.de/lmb

How

A custom software written in java was used to search for websites that play midi background music. New websites submitted by visitors are analyzed by a php script that stores links to the midi file and to the images in a database. An administration interface can be used for managing the content. The LMB website itself makes use of html, javascript, css, php, and mysql.

Why

⟶ Too many words... ⟶ too much blah...? (could also be – but isn't – a rant about graphic designers, users, and the web)

LMB as a website started with a fascination with songs in the MIDI file format. Usually MIDI songs are normal songs re-done in the MIDI format, sometimes to be used by solo entertainers, most often however translated and used by fans. As the files only contain musical notations of the songs, which leads to small file sizes, the audible result depends on the author's as well as the sound card's interpretation. It is this reinterpretation of often extensively produced, and sleek songs, that sometimes makes the copy a lot more interesting than the original.

LMB however, is not only concerned with MIDI music, but tries to establish a connection to a web that is visually and structurally different to what we perceive as the web today. While on one hand it is common to say that "the internet doesn't forget", websites, web designs, and more recently web services, usually have a very short life span. However, as dated as they may look, the websites being part of LMB are in fact still online – it's only very hard to find them among all the search engine optimized websites of a more recent creation date.

Even though their design is modular, often depending on pre-made elements, the websites are in my eyes tellingly different to the profiles (CVs?) we nowadays create of ourselves by merely filling in forms on Facebook, and the likes. They are as much about sharing information as they are about opening up new space in the cyberspace, as much about content as they are about offering an experience.

LMB is not to be mistaken as being merely nostalgic. Looking back in time doesn't only help us understand how we got to where we are now, but also offers the opportunity to think about what might be possible today or in the future. And of course, LMB is about having fun while listening to quirky music.