MIDI and Android: can you achieve individual "note bending" only by assigning a separate channel to every note being played?

Question

I'm in the process of devising my idea for some music-related Android app.

It will probably feature playback using the internal MIDI sound bank (I thought of using free soundfonts but then I'm not sure how easy it is to achieve any pitch shifting at all as it's sample-based rather than synthesized), and the issue is that I want to assure it would play correctly in situations when one note slides to another without the rest shifting as well.

To my understanding the MIDI messages controlling pitch shifting are the portamento CC. Now, it's defined that MIDI supports up to 16 channels, and it's usually a channel per instrument. Could a possible solution during multitrack playback be to have every instrument within a piece play in a separate MIDI player instance and then map at any moment every note generated within that instrument to a different channel of the available 16?

Thank you.

Answer 1

In MIDI 1.0, the only way to have per-note pitch bend is to put the note, whose pitch you want to bend, in its own channel. This is called MPE in the official MIDI 1.0 spec.