The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
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Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#2I 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!
Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#3I 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 eventu…
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.
Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#4When 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...
Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#5MIDI 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!
Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#6When 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 soundf…
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.
Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#7MIDI 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. Additionall…
I always wonder if we'll ever see OSC catch on in the way MIDI has by the big name manufacturers (Roland, Korg, etc). You see it in niche interfaces like the Lemur but not much else. Even the Monome devices don't work with OSC natively, they send serial data over USB, you need software to convert it.
Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#8I 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 eventu…
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.
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.
Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#9If 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
Re: The 30th Anniversary Of MIDI: A Protocol Three Decades On
#10My 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.