Catching The MIDI Virus...

            Out of all the inventions within the audio industry, second to maybe only the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), MIDI has helped shaped the way music is created today. More people then ever are able to create music without knowing how to play an instrument because a couple of brilliant engineers decided they needed a way to connect their synthesizers to other manufacturer’s synthesizers.

            Largely due to two men in the early 80’s, Dave Smith and Chet Wood, we have a digital form of communication for our electronic devices. So what is MIDI? Is it music? Is it an Instrument? Is it easy to use? MIDI, to put it plainly, stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and it is not music, nor does it transfer any sound files; what MIDI is, is a binary code that transfers from one device to another and can do anything from tell a synthesizer what notes were pressed, the velocity they were pressed at, duration, to just about any other performance function you tell it to do.

            MIDI was designed to be simple; it was designed to be modified in the future. When MIDI was first introduced the cable that carried the binary information had 5 pins on the connecter; however, only three pins were used. Why the extra two pins you might ask. Well, the creators, Smith and Wood had enough insight to know that their invention would most likely be modified in the future; hence the reason for the extra two pins.

About thirty years later, are the two extra pins used? Yes and no. Some manufacturers have used the two extra pins to send power to their MIDI devices to get rid of the need for a power cord. The only problem with this method is that some cable manufacturers don’t even run cabling for those two pins on their MIDI cables anymore because of how long they went functionless. So while there is no official or standard use, their forward thinking has benefited some companies.

Here is the real kicker about MIDI. When it was developed, Smith and Wood did not ask for licensing fees. Instead, they wanted their invention to be adopted and standardized as quickly as possible. Talk about good marketing; as Seth Godin put it, free ideas spread like viruses. And spread it did, within one year other synthesizer manufacturers were installing MIDI systems on their devices. Today, MIDI has spread beyond synthesizers to other audio electronic devices such as drum machines, interfaces, all the way to non-musical devices that can cue different visuals onstage such as lighting and video.

            In a world that is overrun with devices that will not communicate nicely (android to apple phones or mac to windows computers), two men gave away their invention so the world of music could have a common digital language. And what beautiful binary it is.

MIDI connector schematic.

...My mistake in "Player Piano" was my failure as a futurist. I did not foresee transistors, and so imagined that super computers would have to be huge, with bulky vacuum tubes taking up a lot of space. -Kurt Vonnegut in "Letters"