I always watch synthesia videos on youtube and actually use them to learn how to play piano pieces I like. I recently bought a digital piano that says it can use MIDI. The thing is, I don’t have any idea how it works and where to start.
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MIDI is an acronym that stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It’s a link between PCs and musical instruments. Your piano with a MIDI interface can probably be set to play music automatically from software running on your laptop. Essentially the software takes over the role typically played by the piano keys.
Basically in the very old days before MP3 and digitised music was a thing, storage was very tight. So MIDI is basically a digital version of sheet music that the computer then plays tones for (soundfonts) that simulate the sound of the instrument the sheet music was intended for. MIDIs are very small insize, like, smaller than a typical MS word document.
MIDI was largely used in games in the MS-DOS/Windows 3.11 days when games came on very small floppy disks, as CD roms became more mainstream, music became digital copies of actual recordings instead.
MIDI is a music language for hard- and software.
Using a hardware MIDI controller, you can control software instruments.
So with your piano, you can play an instrument on your PC.
This also works the other way around:
Using a MIDI software, you can control hardware instruments (if they support MIDI).
This way, you can program music in your PC, and let it play your digital piano for you.
Simply put MIDI is digital sheet music. The concept is that you can play the music on your keyboard and then have a separate MIDI converter with lots of different sounds you can chose between. Or you can record small snippets of MIDI data and then later pick which instruments it should sound like. It used to be that MIDI had its own round connector to connect the different devices together. But now most just use USB to connect to a computer. You have lots of different music programs for computers that you can use to record MIDI input from your digital piano and synthesise it to various different instruments.
Maybe you remember growing up and playing with a digital keyboard at the department store. You could select a couple different “instruments” and when you pressed the piano keys on the keyboard, a synthesized “trumpet” sound would come out. Well professional musicians needed a way to separate the keyboard part from the synthesizer part so that they could get the exact sounds *they* wanted.
So MIDI was invented which was just a standard way to send digital signals from a keyboard to the synthesizer module. This allowed keyboard players to get exactly the keyboard they wanted with the right feel to the keys etc and then connect it to a synthesizer module that had the different sounds they wanted. They need the flexibility of being able to mix and match keyboards with synth modules.
When computers started being powerful enough to do sound, MIDI was extended into a file format that computers could understand. The files were basically just a list of the MIDI commands. You could play the keyboard and have your computer record all the MIDI commands it received and exactly when it received them. Then the file could be used to play back that performance as if someone was doing it again on the keyboard. You could play around with what instrument synth patches you used and you can even manually build a MIDI file on your computer without the keyboard part.
This is why so many people call it digital sheet music. It ended up doing that but that wasn’t the original intention.
Now MIDI is used for all sorts of timing based triggering. I use it at home to allow me to use a physical hardware controller to adjust audio levels in a virtual mixer on my computer. So I move a fader up and down on my controller and it moves the fader inside the software mixer on my computer. MIDI is the language that is used to communicate those fader moves from the controller to my software.
MIDI is also used for lots of automation in live performances. When you’re at a concert and you see the band is playing along in time to a video on the screen. One of the many ways to sync that together is using MIDI.
Musical Instrument Digital Interface, its actually like, a communication type for computers (pretty clever too). It’s a signal that is three numbers, note, velocity, and what it is doing (note down, note up, ect). That’s pretty much it. So when you press a key, it tells the computer
Note: The note is C#3
Velocity: It is played pretty hard
Type: He is pushing the key down.
Then your program uses that info to make a piano note. Or other things, you could make it do whatever you wanted. I could make a fighting game controlled by midi for example. At the moment im using it to make a piano chord practicing online program, but as I use it I see a bunch of ways you could keep track of other things.
MIDI is a way to communicate with digital instruments, by sending simple messages back and forth. These messages can play and stop notes, set what sounds the notes use, as well as send numbers that let us control aspects of the sound in real time. These messages can also be used to control non-musical things, and send much more complex information, but that’s less common.
Over the years, different ways of connecting instruments together have been innovated. In the beginning MIDI was connected using special cables. Now it’s generally sent over USB, but software exists to get it from one instrument to another in any way you want, even over the Internet.
MIDI has limitations, and different standards have tried to replace MIDI, like OSC and MIDI2. While useful, MIDI is still going strong.
MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface
It’s basically just a list of which notes to hit at what times and volumes
There’s some nuance that’s lost between a human player and the MIDI file, but the basic idea is still there.
It’s also super easy to convert a MIDI file to text, which means it doesn’t take up much space in data, like a sound recording would.
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