Who Made These? The Left Hand Remembers.

by Hunter Husar

A Khmer MIDI archive: 3,850 files, four sources, and the chords a keyboard wrote down while somebody played.

I have a folder of Khmer MIDI files: 3,850 of them, no readme, no name on it. Circle dances, cha chas, boleros, twists, slow ballads. I built a player for them. Then the obvious question. Who made these?

Many people, not one. Nothing in the collection names an author and the web has nothing on it. But a MIDI file is a list of instructions, not a recording, and the programs and instruments that write those lists leave habits in them. Read closely, the files say when they were made, on what, for what, and in a few hundred cases the chords a person was holding with their left hand.

1. The Collection

1.1 Four Sources

Nobody merged the folders, so each is still its own source with its own era. The years are the files' own dates.

Duplicates removed, 2,614 songs.

1.2 What Is on It

Every song classified by style from its drum pattern, tempo and chords, checked against the 163 songs whose folder or title names one. Two thirds right on the first guess, so the counts are rough.

A wedding. Slow songs for the singers, romvong and saravan for the circle, cha cha and twist for the floor, a few English songs because somebody always asks.

2. Intuitive Explanation at Increasing Levels

The claim underneath all of this is that a MIDI file can testify.

2.1 Grade School Level

A MIDI file is not a recording. It is a list: press this key now, let go then. A player-piano roll for a computer. The sound comes from whatever plays it back.

2.2 Middle School Level

A list has room for notes. The format has slots for a title, a copyright line, lyrics, track names. Most are blank. Some are not, and some programs fill them in without asking.

2.3 High School Level

Every program that writes MIDI has habits: how finely it slices a beat, how it names tracks, what private messages it adds. Habits are a fingerprint. They do not name the writer. They narrow down the machine.

2.4 College Level

Two fingerprints matter here. Yamaha arranger keyboards write an extension called XF, which records the chord the player is holding at each moment, because the auto-accompaniment needs it. Ringtone converters stamp their names into the text slots. With the file dates and the Excel author fields, the collection has a timeline.

2.5 Formal Reading

Direct means the file says it: a chord event, a stamp, a date. Inferred means the file implies it, as 120 ticks per beat implies a 1990s PC sequencer. Section 5 is inferred throughout. Section 7 keeps the two apart.

3. The Golden Era

Cambodia's golden era ran from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Phnom Penh took in French chanson, Latin dance records and then American and British rock, and made them Khmer. Sinn Sisamouth was its voice and most prolific songwriter, with Ros Serey Sothea, Pen Ran and Yol Aularong. Bands played cha cha, bolero, twist, madison and surf rock on fuzz guitars and combo organs. The old circle dances, romvong, saravan, lam leav and roam kbach, moved onto electric instruments and into nightclubs and weddings.

The Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979, ended it. Musicians were killed or vanished, the recordings were destroyed, and the music survived on cassettes carried abroad and in the memories of the people who had danced to it.

4. The Rebuilding

These files are the rebuilding. Through the 1980s and 1990s the music came back: refugee camps, diaspora studios in Long Beach and Lowell, then the karaoke and VCD boom in Phnom Penh, where production houses turned out cover albums by the hundred. This collection is that repertoire: golden-age standards and their descendants, slow ballads, romvong and saravan, cha chas and boleros, a few Thai, Chinese and English hits, and a Beethoven piece somebody needed for a lesson.

The lyrics are typed in Limon, a hacked Latin font from before Khmer Unicode worked. A catalogue title reads xül;eGIyGñkf¶Úr. With the right font it is Khmer.

5. The Keyboard

572 files, nearly all in the two later folders, carry Yamaha XF chord events and XG sound settings. That is a Yamaha arranger keyboard, the PSR kind with style buttons and a floppy drive, the instrument of the Cambodian wedding band.

So: one person at it, in a front room or a music shop. A wedding keyboardist or a teacher. The left hand holds chords while the keyboard plays drums, bass, guitar and strings; the right hand plays the melody on a saxophone or flute voice. Record, play it through, and the keyboard writes down every chord the left hand held. Set an intro, type the lyrics in Limon for the karaoke screen, number it, add it to the list. B3229. A27. M0258.

One of those songs. Four chords, C, F, G and D minor, round and round for three minutes at a romvong's pace. Four times the keyboard caught the hand between chords: a bare root and fifth for a few hundredths of a second before the third landed. Those are left out of the figure.

6. The Second Life

Then the files were copied onto floppies and CDs, swapped between shops, loaded into other keyboards at other weddings, and edited by whoever came next. Hence "VMP = Hew" on 23 files, "Remix By Moo" on five, and one "Music...By...Eat....N.C.N...".

In 2003 and 2004 the songs went through ringtone converters for Nokia phones. About 430 files carry the PsmPlayer stamp, and the folder holding most of them is named after the Nokia 7250, a 2003 phone. One file in it is a ringtone saved as .mid.

In 2006 people sat down in Excel. The two "200 MIDI Songs" lists: created September 2006 by PC2, last saved by ctc. The 1,095-row list in the NOKIA folder, with Code, SongName and SingerName: made March 2006 by kan, saved by Hong. Those are the only names there are.

7. Summary of the Evidence

8. Implications

Nobody signed the collection because nobody made it as a whole. It is the working library of a scene: anonymous keyboard players, copyists, converters and cataloguers keeping the dance floor going from 1998 to 2006, and in doing so archiving a music that had nearly been erased a generation before. The nearest thing to an author is the left hand in Figure 1, and it did not know it was being recorded.

Where is everybody? At the wedding, holding down a C.

9. Addendum: Open Questions and Sources

Open questions: the Khmer behind the Limon titles, whether the catalogues name singers, and whether anyone in Phnom Penh recognises the B3xxx numbering or the name NARA. If that is you, write to me.

Cambodian music
Music of Cambodia, Cambodian rock, Sinn Sisamouth and Romvong on Wikipedia; Don't Think I've Forgotten, the 2014 documentary on the golden era.

The fingerprints
Limon and the legacy Khmer fonts; Yamaha's arranger keyboards; SMAF, the phone ringtone format PsmPlayer wrote; the Nokia 7250.

The numbers are from a script that read every file. Sections 3 and 4 are the standard account. Section 5 is drawn from the files and consistent with the scene, but not confirmed by any account of this collection.