
The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On - jamesbritt
http://thequietus.com/articles/11189-midi-30th-anniversary
======
ssharp
My parents bought me a Yamaha PSR-230 on a whim for Christmas when I was
probably 14 or 15 in the mid-90's. I had been playing drums for several years
and they must have figured I needed to branch out! They had no idea what MIDI
was and I was only familiar with it for the cheesy music files you could
download off of AOL at the time.

I looked into MIDI more and realized you could hook the keyboard up to your
computer for composing songs, granted I had no idea how to write music. Once I
ordered the cables (over the phone from a catalog!) and received them, I soon
realized that the cheesy sounding songs sounded less cheesy when I played them
through the keyboard rather than the SoundBlaster 16. I also learned that I
could set up the keyboard to examine specific MIDI-in channels and I could
learn chords and melodies from downloaded MIDI files because the keyboard
would have little LEDs above each key that would light up when the notes were
played.

Fast forward about a decade. Over this time, I had learned more about playing
keyboard, learned guitar, and had picked up some music theory and songwriting
knowledge. Now, my stupid little PSR-230 could control just about any sound
imaginable through the use of VSTi's. I could record music that sounded like
the stuff on CD's on my computer using either real instruments or virtual ones
controlled by the PSR!

To this day, even though I have another, more advanced MIDI controller, I'll
often times still use the PSR when I'm working on song ideas.

So happy birthday, MIDI! You're certainly different than my first impressions
of you and you've definitely made my life richer.

~~~
guylhem
I still remember the day when I started playing these cheesy midi files with
"timidity" and a directory full of .pat patches files from a GUS IIRC.

Wow! It sounded great! (a Gravis Ultrasound or even a Soundblaster Wave32 were
over my budget)

At that time I was enjoying mods and s3m, and usually found them better
sounding, but timidity + high quality patches changed all that.

(I still listed to some midi, mods and s3m converted into .wav and burned then
ripped in mp3. good old memories)

------
ChuckMcM
I think MIDI represents a good example of what you can do if you compromise
sensibly. I argued with folks over the 31.25K baud vs 38.4K (9600 x 4).

I also remember the assertion that it was going to "ruin" music because any 10
yr old could program a computer to play tempo perfect renditions of complex
compositions, and yet to this day the accuracy of MIDI was always off putting.

One of my personal milestones was having a stack of instruments that were
capable of 200 simultaneous voices without tape layering. That allowed the
reproduction in real time of a symphony, but the biggest challenge was getting
200 separate MIDI streams running in parallel was a huge task. At one point I
had 20 386 class PC's each capable of producing 10 streams. It was a silly
goal since everyone else layered tracks but for me it was a weird quest to be
a conductor of my own personal symphony orchestra :-)

I learned a lot about how time synchronization protocols can (and do) get
screwed up in real time situations. That was fun.

~~~
TylerE
It's funny how things have progressed, isn't it?

For relatively little $$$, one can have hundreds of gigabytes of professional
samples in VSTi plugins, and be able to render playback so good it would fool
almost all listeners into thinking it was an actual, real, room miced
recording.

All in the end still essentially driven by Midi.

------
th0ma5
MIDI in my mind is unfortunately incomplete, or rather, makes a lot of
assumptions that are great for contemporary western music, but buckle under
the strain of other ideas.

I've seen some really great early music (1200s?) MIDIs put together by
doctorates, and to simulate the early instruments, each note is hand tuned (or
perhaps re-tuned using software, I'm not sure). Those instruments were not
diatonic.

Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you
could or want to, it is just that it isn't something MIDI can handle.

There are a lot of compromises and hacks and such. Recently at PyOhio I saw a
presentation about the raw data of the Open Goldberg Variations, and some of
the raw data from that device has pressure sensitivity readings outside of the
scale of MIDI.

Most artists I see wind up using OSC. It is lower level and more general
purpose, and you can convert to MIDI (lossy) if you need it. I was thinking of
how to sum this up, but I guess MIDI is good for what it is good for, and like
most things, aren't much help when you go down a deep rabbit hole. I love MIDI
though!

~~~
archagon
Have you heard of Scala? <http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/>

It's used to change around the default MIDI scale, so that you can play with
early scales or even scales from other cultures. It's really cool if you get
it working with your keyboard. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of software
that supports it, although I think Logic Pro did at some point.

~~~
th0ma5
Hey err, well I may have stumbled upon this before I knew of its importance,
but I could also be full of myself :P Regardless, thank you for bringing it!!

------
eclipxe
I can thank MIDI for getting me into programming. I was 6 at the time and just
received an awesome, second hand Yamaha keyboard with MIDI out. I spent that
summer researching everything I could about connecting this amazing instrument
to my 386 PC. From that research came a love of discovery, technology,
openness, creation. A love affair with music was the spark that created a love
affair with computing and my eventual career.

Thank you MIDI.

edit: Also, anyone remember early MIDI sharing sites? Way before Napster, the
MIDI/MOD scene was incredible. Still remember dreaming about the Soundfonts,
AWE32 and XM!

~~~
tjr
On the Commodore Amiga, I listened to MOD files a lot. Didn't have MP3 at the
time (I remember how exciting it was when I got my first _MP2_ encoder!), and
a wave file of a whole song took up nearly half of my hard drive. Very
impractical.

~~~
dimastopel
An the Impulse Tracker (+ the fact that it was developed on asm)! For me
Jeffrey Lim was the coolest developer then.

Oh, I remember the playback of my first mp3 file with winamp on my 486 DX4 100
with 4mb RAM. I couldn't even move the mouse without getting stammered
playback.

------
jerf
I got a Korg X5 around '95 and clocked a lot of time using it for composing.
(Poorly, but nonetheless.)

But a fun bonus was hooking it up to video games that supported putting out
music in General MIDI.

In an era where everybody was listening to Adlib FM on their Tie Fighter:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvD_FDS_jE>

I was listening to something more like this:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajz-m0qIDCk>

Although I think my X5 actually sounded even better. (I always thought the
violin and viola were a bit tinny, but the cello was fantastic, and the bass
not too bad. And the choir sounded better in the lower register than that
recording, though you'd still never mistake it for a real choir.)

I also recall the Day of the Tentacle theme _desperately_ needed a good
clarinet sound to sound really good. I often though the theme must have been
composed on the 05/W that the X5 had the same sound set as, because it sounded
that good. Alas, no Youtube love here. (Closest is the MT-32 recording,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQeQzeVmN5w> , but that is _way_ worse than
the X5 rendering.)

~~~
philjohn
Fellow Korg X5 owner here (in fact, mine is still in perfect working order,
sat underneath my bed).

It was an amazing little machine, especially for the money - I had great fun
programming the user sound banks to do some Jean Michelle Jarre(ish) pieces.

------
RyanMcGreal
When I was about 15, I bought a Yamaha TG100 tone generator [1]. It was a
synthesizer without a keyboard, and I composed music on my Windows 3.1 system
with a program called Midisoft Recording Session (apparently in later versions
it was renamed Midisoft Studio).

Amazingly, I can still play those songs today on my Ubuntu machine using
TiMidity [2] and my choice of SoundFont [3] files.

(Note: I'd love to find a soundfont that reproduces the wavetable from the
TG100, my copy of which no longer seems to work.)

[1] [http://usa.yamaha.com/products/music-production/tone-
generat...](http://usa.yamaha.com/products/music-production/tone-
generators/tg100/?mode=model)

[2] <http://timidity.sourceforge.net/>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundFont>

~~~
npsimons
I never got into composing (much), but I still fondly remember my Yamaha
DB50XG daughterboard plugged to a SB16 MCD (ISA bus). Haven't heard another
MIDI, softsynth or wavetable that sounds as good since. Unfortunately, my last
computer with ISA slots was a PPro, and something changed between versions in
PlayMidi[1] to where the drums didn't sound as awesome. Thankfully, I still
have MP3's of MIDI playback on that board for some of my favorite songs.

[1] - <http://sourceforge.net/projects/playmidi/>

------
ajlburke
I had heard about how cool MIDI was, but wasn't blown away until I saw a demo
of MAX back in 1992. MAX let you generate and re-wire MIDI signals in real
time with a simple but powerful graphical interface (it's still around and now
does real-time DSP audio and video processing too).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)>

Later that year I got my hands on a synthesizer and a copy of MAX and it
became the first 'real' programming that I did. The real-time feedback made it
easy to learn and debug, while its graphical nature made it highly prone to
actual 'spaghetti code' unless I properly modularized everything. I quickly
learned that I was a better programmer than musician - so I set up MAX to
'cybernetically enhance' my own playing.

If it wasn't for MIDI's fairly simple protocol and MAX's powerful tools built
around it, I might not even be a programmer today.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Not to mention PD, its free cousin:

<http://puredata.info/>

------
fbuilesv
If you're interested in MIDI and how it's been used in some really weird ways
I'd recommend Adrian Belew's "History & Future of Guitar Noise". You can watch
it on YouTube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWfxQ4QFM4M>

------
bhauer
Funny, I remember writing custom communication protocols over the MIDI ports
of my Atari ST because, at least on that hardware, MIDI ran at a higher bit-
rate than the serial port.

Oh, and playing MIDI-Maze [1].

Never actually used it to drive an instrument.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze>

------
teeja
This is one of the most anti-MIDI articles I've read since MIDI was first
released. It's pretty much a rag-tag collection of all the cheap shots and
whining that have become oh, so familiar in that time.

MIDI has survived for 30 years in an intense, worldwide marketplace without
any serious competition. Name any other communication protocols in widespread
use that can say that, and you've named another massive success. Most of
MIDI's supposed shortcomings (to the extent that they're not operator-related)
can be dealt with by extending the default hardware and doing a little
programming.

------
totoe
I love my serial midi cabel since the early 90s. Cant imagine the BIG players
sitting on a table discussing a standard for music communication. It feels
wrong that technology Manufacturers todays not able to give us a simple way
for e.g. charging battery for all mobils with ONE Cable. Happy birthday MIDI.

------
dividebyzero
An interesting use of midi data can be seen with the Fretlight Guitar:
<http://www.fretlight.com> (disclaimer, I work for them). Midi data is tagged
so that it can light up the guitar fretboard to teach you how to play. Any
Guitar Pro 6 tab can light up the Fretlight.

------
danbmil99
I did this: <http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/phantom>

It did all the SMPTE reading & writing in software. Good times.

------
largesse
It was an okay article at the beginning, but I really didn't expect it to
start claiming that MIDI alienated women and turned music into a male
hegemony.

~~~
bitwize
Anyone who seriously believes that has never heard Imogen Heap.

~~~
ramses
Not only is she a wizard with current technologies, she is also working on new
ways to create music.

