The MIDI World
My presentation can be useful for those who study music technologies, but the others may also find out something new and interesting. I am here to enlighten you about MIDI, in fact – a short history of it. MIDI is a standart for connecting digital electronic musical instruments. But before MIDI there were synthesizers…
The first synthesizer was built in 1955. The synthesizers made in this early time were however very expensive and also very hard to handle (as it is known first synthesizer costed around 100‘000 $). In the 1960s the first really useful synthesizer was made by Robert Moog (you can see him on the right). Robert Moog is the most legendary of the synthesizer producers with products like MiniMoog and others, which has been much used by synthpop musicians. Like many of his designs, Moog’s envelope generators became a basic component of later synthesizers.
As time passed by, a wide variety of new synthesizers, keyboards, drum machines were made and prices dropped. The market was developing.
We can thank Japanese who brought MIDI to the world. About fifteen companies came to one meeting. All of them shared the desire to bring out something reasonable…something new… Roland came up with UMII. You were supposed to call it you-me. But the corporation came back with MIDI, because that seemed the closest description to what it was.. In 1983 Roland demonstrated MIDI: you could play the keyboard on one and the other would play right along with it.
How it works? MIDI sends information about pitch, timbre, velocity and so on, but it doesn’t send the actual sounds, just numbers representing the sounds. MIDI is now present in most personal computers. The most common sound source for modern synthesizers are digital recordings of real sounds, from usual music instruments or from analogue synthesizers.
MIDI was a multiple compromise between cost, performance, market preferences, and many different things.. So congratulations to Apple‘s first Computer and to Robert Moog. Without them, I, and many others like me, wouldn’t have the opportunities to create electronic music in homes, schools, and studios.