Midi History

In the early 1970’s, the advent of electronic music synthesizers and other electronic music devices like 8 step-voltage sequencers, with their near-universal voltage-control standard of 1 volt/octave, seemed to be proposing a new era of compatibility between musical equipment from different manufacturers. For any one who used those instruments they knew that the control voltages from a Mini-MOOG keyboard could also be used to control elaborate expander modules from Oberheim. The result was less than amazing and that “2 oscillators an a filter” sound which had become the synthesizer way of making music soon began to be replaced by more dynamically, fatter, louder and timbrally captivating musical voices; and before we knew the Fine Arts in its musical form will take a quantum step forward discovering new ways of expression.

The first polyphonic (many note) synthesizer (if my mind don’t go wrong came from Oberheim) seemed to be builded using the same control-voltage scheme, they just used a kind of “computer” – microprocessor so to speak- to deal with the generation of all the control voltages used by multiple oscillators, amplifiers and filters. Then, suddenly, the industry began to realize how convenient in terms of economics was to do some of the traditional functions with software rather than with voltages controlling physical elements. Oscillators as you might guess were the first analog functions to be developed with such technology using the ability of the computer for doing repetitious functions. Since there was no longer a control voltage, there was now no way to interface the elements coming from one manufacturer to expander elements coming from another manufacturer; and soon somehow we started to live a new version of the “babel tower” musically speaking.

Some companies realizing the limitation imposed on the user, developed bus structures to allow expansion. Some were serial buses aimed to be cheap and easy to get, and some were parallel aimed to be fast and more accurate. But they all were propietary – interfacing between equipment from different manufacturers ranged from difficult to impossible.

In December of 1982, Sequencial circuits, Inc. (manufacturer of the Prophet – the first widely accepted poliphonic synthesizer and known for the fantastic Prophet V) shipped their first units of their Prophet 600. One of the most interesting features of that new instrument was that it included serial connectors for what Sequential president Dave Smith had named the Universal Synthesizer Interface -USI- (let me guess here: I suppose this was build around a chip called ASIO -Asynchronous Serial Input Output- well known at that time in the electronics industry). At the winter music industry trade show that same year, tech people from Sequential, Yamaha and several other US and Japanese companies met informally to discuss standardization. They agreed that a protocol very similar to Dave Smith’s USI offered the best compromise of speed, simplicity and low cost.

In the June of 1983, a Prophet 600 was interfaced with a Yamaha DX-7 (an instrument based on John Chowning’s somewhat serendipitous, but none the less insightful discovery of FM-synthesis techniques and destined to change electronic keyboard instruments forever). The results fell slightly short of spectacular, but were so encouraging that in Tokio in August of 1983, representatives from Sequential ( the only US manufacturer), Roland, Yamaha, Korg and Kawai agreed on the “MIDI 1.0” specification. The rest is history, the results: historic.

Evolution

They have passed more than 20 years that the same 1.0 specification has been around with none or few changes. This is amazing comparing with the computer software industry which in the same period has offered us more than 10 versions of the “de-facto” operating system.

After that historic event in which two competitor companies entangled their instruments to control each other, MIDI has been a common place for developing electronic music instruments. On fact nowadays any electronic instrument which has not a midi port conceived in its design is nonsense and convicted to fail

But what has been the evolution of MIDI to our days? Well as I told before any serious instrument manufactured from 1983 to nowadays have varying connector MIDI ports. Some had one input port, others had just one output port but the most had two MIDI ports one for input and another for output. Latter on I’ll discuss the inner workings of this wonderful piece of hardware.

Use in our days

One of the biggest areas of MIDI impact has to be writing and performing musical scores for films and videos. A composer used to hire musicians to play all instruments; the piano the drum, horns, guitars, violins, etc. And, since he couldn't tell what the score would sound like until it was rehearsed (not every composer is a Beethoven), chances are that, after hearing what he'd written, it would have to go back to the composition room for a revision. Then there would be take after take until the mood and timing of the piece matched the action on the screen.

Another use as noted ahead is in applications as stage-lighting and "dancing fountains", even smart houses is a niche yet to be developed.