Eventually I started carrying the converter in a little padded pouch. It fit beside spare picks and a pen. At airports people mistook it for a charger. On trains it sat like a talisman. Musicians asked to borrow it; I lent it out and took photos of the device hooked to strangers’ instruments and to a busted drum machine with a missing pad. Each run produced a file with small signatures—the click of a thumb, the synth’s slow drift, a sudden clap from someone passing by.
Word spread the way small attachments do among musicians: a forum thread, a short message in a local gear swap group, someone posting a shaky clip of a MIDI piano rendering a sunburnt synth line. Requests arrived—could it save tempo maps? Could it preserve modulation curves? I made a list and learned what “preserve” meant in practice: some things survive the crossing unchanged, others mutate into the language of MIDI, which is precise but blunt at the edges. minigsf to midi portable
And in that moment, the composer’s intent—fractured, compressed, encrypted, reverse-engineered, betrayed, and reborn—finally escapes its 1997 prison. Not as a preservation. Not as a transcription. Eventually I started carrying the converter in a