4 ms·

As much as his synths are great and have had a huge impact, the impact of MIDI is hard to overstate. It changed the way music was written, recorded and performe

by s1mon 4y ago

As much as his synths are great and have had a huge impact, the impact of MIDI is hard to overstate. It changed the way music was written, recorded and performed by giving a common electronic format for playing notes, changing timbres, synchronizing rhythms, etc. MIDI isn't just a transport protocol, it's the whole stack including an encoding scheme and a physical layer. It's like inventing ASCII, TCP-IP and Ethernet cables all at the same time. [0] While there have been a number of significant extensions to the basic protocol since 1983 (e.g. General MIDI, machine control, sample dump standard, etc), and alternate hardware layers have been added (e.g. MIDI over USB), amazingly very little of the core standard changed until recently. Many devices still have 5-pin DIN jacks on them, and the instruments from the first public demo in 1983 could be connected to a brand new device and talk to each other today. The MIDI 2.0 spec was only adopted in 2020. Dave Smith and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi received a technical Grammy award in 2013 for their work on MIDI. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI

tgv 4y ago
Only yesterday, I saw a video of someone playing a huge pipe organ from a laptop via MIDI. And it worked. Despite its shortcomings, it's an amazing communication model. Quite the legacy.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Beloved by keyboard players. Not quite so much by performers who generally perform on other instrument designs. MIDI is excellent at representing the performance characteristics of a keyboard, but you really have to warp it quite a bit to represent performance on stringed or wind instruments.
  - tgv 4y ago
    True. That's one of the shortcomings I alluded too, but still it's possible to achieve fairly reasonable sound with MIDI of percussion, guitar, and even violin performance. I think the main reason other performers like it a lot less is that there's no way to digitally capture of their performance parameters. E.g., there are some guitar pickups with MIDI out, but that can't capture the techniques, even though MIDI could represent it (albeit in a non-standard fashion).
achairapart 4y ago
Fun fact: After the Grammy Award, Ikutaro Kakehashi, mostly out of the blue, convinced somehow Yamaha to bring the Sequential brand back to Dave Smith, just before the release of the Prophet 6.

by s1mon 4y ago

tgv 4y ago

Only yesterday, I saw a video of someone playing a huge pipe organ from a laptop via MIDI. And it worked. Despite its shortcomings, it's an amazing communication model. Quite the legacy.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Beloved by keyboard players. Not quite so much by performers who generally perform on other instrument designs. MIDI is excellent at representing the performance characteristics of a keyboard, but you really have to warp it quite a bit to represent performance on stringed or wind instruments.
- tgv 4y ago
  True. That's one of the shortcomings I alluded too, but still it's possible to achieve fairly reasonable sound with MIDI of percussion, guitar, and even violin performance. I think the main reason other performers like it a lot less is that there's no way to digitally capture of their performance parameters. E.g., there are some guitar pickups with MIDI out, but that can't capture the techniques, even though MIDI could represent it (albeit in a non-standard fashion).

achairapart 4y ago

Fun fact: After the Grammy Award, Ikutaro Kakehashi, mostly out of the blue, convinced somehow Yamaha to bring the Sequential brand back to Dave Smith, just before the release of the Prophet 6.