This meant that a musician could not, for example, plug a Roland keyboard into a Yamaha synthesizer module. : 4 A MIDI recording of a performance on a keyboard could sound like a piano or other keyboard instrument however, since MIDI records the messages and information about their notes and not the specific sounds, this recording could be changed to many other sounds, ranging from synthesized or sampled guitar or flute to full orchestra.īefore the development of MIDI, electronic musical instruments from different manufacturers could generally not communicate with each other. Advantages of MIDI include small file size, ease of modification and manipulation and a wide choice of electronic instruments and synthesizer or digitally sampled sounds. Ī file format that stores and exchanges the data is also defined. MIDI data can be transferred via MIDI or USB cable, or recorded to a sequencer or digital audio workstation to be edited or played back. One common MIDI application is to play a MIDI keyboard or other controller and use it to trigger a digital sound module (which contains synthesized musical sounds) to generate sounds, which the audience hears produced by a keyboard amplifier. Each interaction with a key, button, knob or slider is converted into a MIDI event, which specifies musical instructions, such as a note's pitch, timing and loudness. It is more like a piano roll, indicating the pitch, start time, stop time and other properties of each individual note, rather than the resulting sound.Ī single MIDI cable can carry up to sixteen channels of MIDI data, each of which can be routed to a separate device. Ī MIDI recording is not an audio signal, as with a sound recording made with a microphone.

The specification originates in the paper Universal Synthesizer Interface published by Dave Smith and Chet Wood of Sequential Circuits at the 1981 Audio Engineering Society conference in New York City. MIDI ( / ˈ m ɪ d i/ Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music. This system fits into a single rack case, but before the advent of MIDI, it would have required four separate full-size keyboard instruments, plus outboard mixing and effects units. Using MIDI, a single controller (often a musical keyboard, as pictured here) can play multiple electronic instruments, which increases the portability and flexibility of stage setups.

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