1983

MIDI Computer Music Interface

Dave Smith (dates unavailable), Ikutaro Kakehashi (1930–2017)

Before the invention of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface—better known as MIDI—there were technical and practical challenges to producing a piece of music comprising different instruments and sounds. Musicians could use an orchestra of people, or they could combine sounds from different synthesizers with a multitrack recorder, a cumbersome, inefficient process. Of course, there was also the one-man band. And then came MIDI.

As the micro revolution in the 1970s developed into a full-fledged industry, advances in computers started disrupting traditional market sectors, such as the music industry. As the popularity of synthesized sound in music composition and the number of manufacturers that designed hardware and software to produce it grew, so did the complications associated with making all of these technologies talk to one another in order to create the end product—music. Dave Smith and Ikutaro Kakehashi (both musicians and engineers), along with others in the industry, recognized this challenge and pushed for development and acceptance of a single digital communication protocol to solve it.

The protocol was designed to enable many synthesizers or other electronic instruments to be interoperable with one another through a single interface or “master controller” that managed how the original sound sources were mixed, manipulated, and edited. Essentially, the protocol has a set of commands telling different instruments to play different notes. To create MIDI messages, a composer could simply play a sequence on a keyboard: the messages would be sent over the interface. Those MIDI messages could then be saved in a MIDI file, which, when played back over the interface, would recreate the music. MIDI made it easy for traditional sectors of the music industry to computerize, while it revolutionized the creative possibilities for music composition. It also helped popularize the home recording studio and put music creation into the hands of more users, because now it was possible to compose and record great music without having to be a virtuoso performer: the computer did the playing.

Using MIDI, the computer can follow the melody that the musician plays and generate a synthetic accompaniment.