Class Notes #6
Music, Sound & MIDI
Reference Book: Essentials of Music Technology, Mark Ballora, Prentice-Hall.(2002)
MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface
MIDI is used throughout the music and show entertainment industries. It is also one of the most common ways to send music files (not the sound) across the web. We need to know about MIDI because all music software and electronic (digital) musical instruments can send and/or receive MIDI.
Look at some basic MIDI tutorials to get the general idea first.
MIDI Tutorial (very brief)
MIDI Tutorial (longer, good overall computer music site)
MIDI Specfication (very long and complicated - the full spec!)Who uses MIDI?
Every PC or Mac has built-in a set of instrument samples called "General MIDI" or something similar. This means that any web page, program, "greeting card", game, etc. that has midi data built in will "play" automatically on your computer.
But the main users of MIDI are musicians and sound designers. Every device in the recording or computer music studio is based on MIDI - all the keyboards, the notation programs, the automation of the mixing console and other devices. These all use MIDI data to either play music or to permit the recording and playback of "gestures". For example, if I slide a fader or turn a knob on the mixing desk, I can record these actions and recall them at any time.
Here is a very nice example of a Beethoven MIDI piano piece that uses the data to display the actions of the notes in a kind of piano-roll view that scrolls by in real time. This software was developed by a S. Wolonosky in 1990 using relatively modest resources. bagatelle demo
Another less obvious use of MIDI is to make "musical animations". Animusic is a company that specializes in custom 3D animation in which the MIDI data actually controls the movements of the visual objects. Of note here - Jeff Garrard (UT RTF Staff) is one of the contributor/developers for Animusic!
As a general purpose message-based protocol for musical and other kinds of human gesture, MIDI remains a central tool for multi-media development of many kinds.
You can find a myriad of musical pieces on countless web sites. Some of my favorites are: classical music archives, rock midi database, mididb (everything!)