Getting MIDI With It

of music in of itself. I'm going to tackle that last question first, because that was just an easy setup. While some people use MIDDY as shorthand for computer music, the two are not exactly the same thing. MIDDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and it's a protocol, a set of rules that allows a synthesizer or MIDI controller to send data to a computer or other synthesizers in a meaningful way. And in fact, no sound is sent through MINI at all, which might seem a little strange.

To understand MINY and how it works, it first behooves us to go into a little history on synthesizers in general, starting with analog synthesizers. Now an analog synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that makes use of various components to produce and shape sound. These components can be modular. In fact, the earliest analog synthesizers were entirely modular. You have to get a whole bunch of different components and patch them

together with cables. This is what we call patches in order to make any sort of meaningful sound at all, and certain modules are in charge of creating certain effects or sounds. Modules can include stuff like oscillators, filters, and voltage control amplifiers. Typically, a synthesizer has at minimum three basic modules. The first is an oscillator. The oscillator's job

is to create a base tone. This tone is what the rest of the modules can shape to create the different pitches and effects that change the shape of the sound. And oscillator causes energy to move between two states at a particular frequency. Now this is easiest to imagine. I think with a physical oscillator like a pendulum. If you push a pendulum, it will begin to swing or oscillate, and one full swing is one full oscillation. At the height of its swing, all of the energy in the

system is potential energy. Right, it's not moving. It's at its highest point that energy converts into kinetic energy as gravity takes hold in the pendulum swings downward. This swinging is the oscillation. But oscillators will eventually run out of energy due to loss in the system. This is that law of thermodynamics. In this physical example, friction cuts down on the amount of energy within the system. It actually means the you're losing energy out of the system due

to heat in circuits. Oscillators lose energy due to electrical resistance, so it's very similar. The point being that unless you continue to pour energy back into the system, it will eventually run down because it will lose enough energy so

it doesn't perpetuate itself anymore. Now, again, to the physics of oscillators would take up a bit more time, so let's just leave it at the idea that there is a component within an analog synthesizer that generates a steady frequency that serves as the baseline for all other modules

in the synthesizer. The second component in a typical synthesizer is the mechanism for controlling the oscillator, which is usually a keyboard similar to one on a piano, you could use other means to change the wave form, though, for example, Derriman's use fluctuations in the electromagnetic field to affect the baseline waveform. Though precise complete control of the signal isn't really possible with such an instrument, even under the control

of a skilled player. The keyboard or pitch wheel or whatever can set the oscillators frequency will affect the pitch. The frequency of a sound and how we perceive that sound are directly related. Lower frequencies produce lower pitch sounds. Human hearing ranges from about twenty hurts or twenty cycles of a sound wave per second, up to twenty thousand hurts. As we get older, like me, those upper ranges start

to get harder for us to perceive. This is the principle behind some anti youth, anti loitering strategy supposedly employed by certain convenience store owners, which have reportedly resorted to playing very high pitch sounds that adults can't really hear because they've lost that ability, they've lost that range of hearing. But those lousy kids in that mangi mutt can totally hear it, and it irritates the heck out of them so they don't stick a range your store for too long.

The third component found in typical synthesizers would be the filters and effects you can apply to the sounds waveform to change the nature of the sound the feel of it. These filters let you select which elements of the frequency can pass through to an amplifier so that it can hit a speaker and be heard by gate Keeping elements of frequencies, you can change that shape or nature of a sound, which is why you can have a synthesizer take on many different sounds even though it's starting with

the same basic wave form. Beyond frequency or pitch and amplitude or volume, you can also manipulate the change in volume over the lifespan of a sound. So if you press down on a piano key quickly and firmly, you'll notice that the sound is initially loud and then fades off, and when you let up off the piano key, it will eventually stop. If you mess with the sustained pedals, you can push down that same key with the same

force and hear it play out a little differently. And we describe this process with synthesizers by dividing it up into phases, and they're called attack, decay, sustain and release, or a D s R. The attack describes the time it takes from the press of a key or the null sound zero volume to reach the peak of that keys volume. The decay is the time it takes to go from the peak of the volume to a designated

sustain level. The sustain is the volume of sound that should play until the respective key is released by the player. The release time is the amount of time it takes for the sustained volume to decay to null again. The various effects on synthesizers can change these elements, creating louder or softer sustains. You can even have a sustain that gets louder than the attack if you wanted to, and you could have longer or shorter decay times and tons

more effects. It helps create a more dynamic experience with a synthesized instrument. After the synthesizer manipulates the basic wave form based on the keys pressed or however you're controlling the pitch and the various filters or effects that are in play, it sends the electrical signal to an amplifier. The amplifier's job is to control the volume the played sound, typically by passing it through a series of what are called envelope controls. That goes back to that a D

s R. I was talking about. Envelope controls are essentially tables of data points that describe the nature of the sound generated when a key is pressed. Early synthesizers used actual physically distinct modules to control all this, like I said before, and you would hook all these modules up to a keyboard with various patch wires, and you would manipulate various switches and knobs to coax the sound you

wanted out of the synthesizer. And if you didn't get the sound you wanted, you might have to add additional components to change things up. Now, the history of synthesizers is somewhat debatable, and that's because people disagree over what actually counts as a synthesizer. Some say that the tell harmonium should count. The tell harmonium, also known as the dynamo phone, which I swear sounds like something Homer Simpson would say, was invented by Thaddeus Hill in the eighteen nineties.

It was an elect trick organ that could send music electronically across telephone networks. Now, his goal was to create an instrument capable of creating perfect tones consistently. Physical musical instruments need to be tuned, and they can change their tones based upon variables like temperature and humidity, not to mention the skill of the person playing, But the tell Harmonium would harness electricity to create pitch perfect tones over

and over again, or so is the idea. But the tell Harmonium didn't allow the player to put precise controls on the quality of a sound, something that some argue should be a basic trait of synthesizers. So they say, well, it shouldn't count. The Thereman, which came out in nineteen nineteen, also fails in this regard. French inventors Eduard Couplau and Armand give Lais created the piano with electronic components in that comes closer to the definition many except as cannon

for synthesizers. The first device to actually use the word synthesizer appears to have been the r C A Electronic music Synthesizer Mark one, which debuted in nineteen fifty six and used tuning forks to generate tones It read music from a strip of paper tape that had holes punched into it, so it's sort of like a player piano. But if we're talking modern synthesizers, we got to talk about Robert Moge, the genius behind the Mogue synthesizer. I've done a full episode about Mogue in the past, so

I'm not gonna dwell on it too much here. I'll just add that he created the first commercial synthesizer by modern standards in nineteen sixty four, and it was the Moges nine series Modular Systems. One big limitation in most analog synthesizers is in the number of notes it can play simultaneously. Many analog synthesizers are monophonic, meaning they can only produce one tone at a time. If you held

down two keys, you would not get two tones. If you want to create a poly phonic sound the way you could with say a piano, you'd have to either get a whole bunch of musicians together, each playing one section of a polyphonic piece on their own mode synthesizer, whichever analog synthesizer they're using, all in time with one another, or you'd have to record multiple tracks to fill in the tones, so each track would represent a different monophonic melody,

and played together you would get the polyphonic effect. Eventually, some analog synthesizers supported polyphonic tones at a limited level, for example four notes played simultaneously, and they tended to

be incredibly expensive. As for digital synthesizers, which are at their hearts computers working with bits as a good old zeros and ones of machine language, those trace their history back to research in the late fifties, but commercial digital synthesizers really got their start in the nineteen eighties next craze New Wave. Like analog sent the sizers, they generate

or modulate waveforms to create sounds. The process from a very high level is similar, but the details are different, and digital synthesizers can do some things that analog synthesizers either cannot do or it cannot do very well. For example, one analog synthesizer might be monophonic or have limited polyphonic capabilities.

A basic digital synthesizer could have a polyphony if you like, of sixty four notes being played simultaneously, although I should add that that depends also on how many voices you're playing on this synthesizer. With each voice, you reduce the number of notes that can be played simultaneously, because each voice gets a certain number of notes dedicated to it. That being said, there's no guarantee that a digital synthesizer will sound better than an analog one. It could or

it might not. It all depends upon build quality of the two synthesizers. Sound quality relies on more than just the number of options you have when you're shaping sound. All right, So that's the basic info on synthesizers. Now let's talk about many. In the early nineteen eighties, a man named Dave Smith saw the need for a universal standard that would allow synthesizers to send data to other instruments or to computers. This would give musicians unprecedented options

when making music, including new ways to manipulate sound. Synthesizers were versatile, but no two models were exactly alike, particularly from different manufacturers. One model might have a really cool feature that other synthesizers lacked, but fall short on a completely different feature. A universal protocol could let a musician chain together multiple instruments or perform additional processes on sound at the computer level. Related to this problem, is one

of competing proprietary approaches to musical interfaces. Without a standard, each synthesizer manufacturer would be compelled to produce its own interface with other synthesizers and with computers. In fact, such standards did exist, they weren't there weren't really standards, They were proprietary approaches that were unique to specific manufacturers like Rowland,

for example, or Yamaha. Then you would have a bunch of competing technologies on the market that more likely than not, would be impossible to chain together, so you'd be locked into one ecosystem. You would have to be all in on Rowland, or all in on Mogue, or all in on Yamaha. You couldn't mix and match because they wouldn't be able to talk to each other. It's sort of like the early days of computing before arpanet came along and you had a set of protocols that would let

computers talk to each other. Same basic problem existed at at the early nineteen eighties. It was a huge mess for musicians and producers, So a universal standard would set a level playing field, give musicians and producers the greatest number of options when creating music and avoid fragmentation of the market. Dave Smith first proposed such a standard in nine one at a meeting of the Audio Engineering Society, and he called his first approach the Universal Synthesizer Interface.

Smith recognized that while manufacturers were able to create systems that would allow you to control multiple synthesizers made by that manufacturer, there was still no standard that would allow for interoperability, and manufacturers were concerned that this issue was costing them customers by creating this frustrating environment. Two years later, he would release the first version of the MIDI protocols. This three, he didn't develop the protocol all by himself.

Major synthesizer companies like Roland, Yamaha, and several others were all involved in designing the set of rules and standards. It was a pretty remarkable display of competitors working together to create a technology that would benefit the entire industry, not just one company within it. The designers decided that MIDI would send information as a list of events or messages to instruct a device how to make a certain

type of sound. Now, again, this wasn't a music file or any other form of music, but rather direct is the recipient would follow to generate the appropriate sound. I'll talk about some of the typical MINI messages in the next section, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Here are a few basic messages the Mini protocol defined note on. This is a message that indicates a note has been initiated, which is pretty self

explanatory by the name. So on a keyboard, this would be when a key has been pressed, but other instruments can also have mini ports on them, so it could also mean a guitar string is strummed or a clarinet has produced a note. The instructions tell the device receiving this data which note has been played and the velocity of the note. Velocity equals how hard the note was played, so with a piano key it relates to volume. For example, if you press the key faster, it indicates a harder strike,

which means that the note should be louder. Not every MIDI keyboard is capable of actually recording that information, but a lot of them are. They have that velocity sensitive keys, so you can actually record that info. Note off is a similar message. It tells when the receiving device uh that a played note has ended, so it might be when you have released a key, or when vibrations stop along a string, and that message says, all right, at this point, stop playing a note because there's no longer

a thing that's generating that sound. Polyphonic key pressure is another instruction that tells the receiving device how hard a key was pressed once it bottoms out in its lowest position. Some keyboards use this to add effects to notes, such as vibrato. The bar brato. By the way, that's a rapid variation in pitch, So you add a quick oscillation and pitch to create vibrato. It adds a richness to sound. Also, singers use it to cover up the fact that they

can't hit a note. That's a little shade throwing right there. Also, I do this too. So. Control change is a message that indicates that some sort of controller has been activated to affect the quality of a sound. Controllers can take many forms. You could have pedals, you could have knobs. Then control change message contains information that indicates which controller was used and the signs of value from zero to one,

seven or one to eight, depending upon the implementation. To describe the magnitude of this change, The pitch wheel change message records instances of pitch wheel use. That's not useful at all, is it. A pitch wheel is a control that allows a musician to affect the pitch of a played note, and they can control it dynamically. This creates

the effect of bending a musical note. So if you've ever heard musical piece where a note is played and then starts to shift to a different pitch without a new note being played, that's kind of what a pitch wheel is able to do. And then there are system ex collusive or six X messages. This allows for custom patches and effects. Manufacturers could use these messages to allow a mini controller to take advantage of unique features of

their instruments. For example, so let's say you're a manufacturer and you've got a synthesizer that has a new type of effect, and no other synthesizers have this. It's proprietary. You've got this cool effect that no one else has been able to replicate. The sis X feature would allow you to designate a method for a mini controller to engage that feature without sharing it to everybody else. Otherwise, you'd have a keyboard that has a really cool ability, but you never be able to use it through a

MIDI controller because there'd be no way to designate that command. Right, you have your own proprietary effect. If you don't create a command for it in MIDI, then the controller won't have any instructions that can send to the synthesizer to replicate it. Now, you could still get the effect by working with the synthesizer directly, but you want be able to send those MIDI instructions to any other device because there wouldn't there wouldn't be language to take care of

that particular instance. Sis X messages allowed for these exceptions, these custom patches. A MIDI file has the extension m I D or mid. If you could read these files in natural language, like if you were able to translate this as a set of instructions, they would seem like really detailed instructions on how to play a certain piece of music, not just what the notes are, but how to play those notes. It would be similar to reading sheet music, but only if the sheet music contained all

sorts of minutia about the performance of the piece. And it's not just how that one piece should be performed, it's how that piece actually was performed once upon a time, So it means you're not just transcribing music. You are actually re creating a performance of a musical piece. And you could actually create a mid file by playing a

MIDI enabled musical instrument connected to a computer. It it's actually sequencing your playing as you play it, so you are creating a precise record on how to play the same piece of music the exact same way in the future. So again, it's not a recording, it's a set of instructions saying, if you want to play what I just played the way I played it, follow these instructions exactly, and it will be as if I were playing it all over again, which is pretty cool all by itself.

But an additional benefit of the MIDI system is that you can modify those instructions in different ways without affecting everything. So, for example, if you record a piece of music in some sort of conventional format and you then play it at a faster speed, you're going to increase the pitch. If I recorded a performance onto a physical medium like a vinyl record, and then I played the record back at a speed that was one and a half times

faster than what a normal playback would be. But with midfiles, you can increase the speed of a playback without effecting the pitch. You aren't speeding up a recording of a performance, but rather decreasing the amount of time between instructions, and so you can change the temple of music easily without also changing the pitch of the recording. Or if you want to change the pitch, you could do that too.

You could take the instructions and apply a new instruction to shift the playback into a different key of music. The tempo would be the same, but the key would be completely different. You could take music that was programmed in a major key and you can flip it to a minor key. Or you could take a song and shift the pitch down or up to better suit someone's voice.

If you've ever gone to karaoke and the karaoke machine had an option to change the pitch to pitch something up or down so it's closer to your vocal range, you've experienced this. The karaoke machine was using mini files to recreate a song, and then you can dynamically tell it, Hey, I need this pitched up or pitched down so I can actually rock out with Hit me with your best shot and make sure it's in my vocal range. Another big benefit of the mid file format is file size.

Because there's no recorded media in the file, the file sizes are relatively small, so a minute of compressed audio like an MP three might end up being about ten megabytes of data data. But if you take a MIDI file and it represents the exact same amount of sound, it's a minute worth of sound. Although again remember there's no recorded sound in a MIDI file just represents that that would only take up ten kilobytes of space, so much smaller file sizes and a lot of data gets

packed into those small files. The MIDI protocol supports a total of one notes, ranging from the C five five octaves below middle C all the way up to the G ten octaves above middle C up to sixteen. Separate devices can be controlled through a single chain or more if you want multiple devices to produce the same response.

So for example, if you want both a piano and a claren at to play back the same melody line and a piece of music, they could each follow the exact same set of instructions and they would count as just one channel of data rather than two channels of data. You would just put those in serial with each other, and you could still divide up the rest of the channels among other instruments. In addition to this, you can have up to a D eight voice or effect settings

called programs. These are the various modifiers that can change the shape of the sound in various ways to keep everything synchronized across multiple instruments. Not to mention other elements that I'll talk about later, MIDI has support for built in clock pulses. The clock pulses make sure that each component in the overall system is on the same starting point. If the MIDI standard didn't have this, there'd be no way to synchronize a controller, to manipulate multiple devices and

have them work in harmony with each other. They would all start to get off time with each other and you would end up with a huge mess. So you have to have this clock pulse feature to make sure every single instrument in the system is sync with each other. The way you generate a MIDI file is using either a MIDI enabled synthesizer which doesn't have to be a keyboard, but more frequently than not it is a keyboard, or a MIDI controller. So what's the difference. Well, synthesizers can

create sound while they simultantaneously generate MIDI data. They have a sound generator built into the device, they become workstations. A MIDI controller only generates the data. So many MIDI controllers look like musical keyboards, but they do not generate any music when you play them, uh on their own. So you're not like tickling the keys and hearing music back unless you've already hooked it up to a computer and the computers sound card is able to generate the

music in real time back to you. So what's the whole point. Well, imagine that you have your MIDI controller keyboard in front of you, and you've used cables to connect to your controller to several other devices such as a MIDI enabled drum machine, MIDI enabled synthesizer, and electronic clarinet. You've mapped your MIDI controller keyboard keys to each of those connected components, so that when you play one section

of the keyboard, you're controlling one of them. Like let's say that you've got sixty four keys, and the bottom few you've got maybe the Bobs sixteen that controls the drum pad, and then the other two sections control the the synthesizer, and the top section controls the electronic clarinet. That would be one way of doing this. So while the controller itself doesn't generate sound, the instructions that sends to each of those components makes those components make the sound.

So you really just have a control system. It's really no different from like a joystick or a mouse. It's an input device and your output devices happen to be these other components. So think of it in that sense. When you think of MIDI controllers and synthesizers as very specialized computers, it starts to be a little easier to understand. So you've just increased the number of instruments you can simultaneously control using a single MIDI controller connected to them.

You could also use one of these silent controllers to create a MIDI file on a computer, but unless you were playing that music back on the computer, would be really hard to hear how it was turning out. It would be difficult to see if in fact what you were doing was what you wanted. So most MIDI sequencers, which are what we call the programs that translate the actions you take into the mathematical data that is a MIDI file. Uh, most of them have playback so that

you can actually hear what's happening while you're playing. Otherwise it would be really difficult to figure out if you were doing things correctly. And as I say, the process is called sequencing. So the sequencer is the tool that records all those messages, the messages that are in the they're in eight bits per message, so eight bits is a bite. Each message is made up of a bite, and the sequencer maps those instructions out against a timeline.

It records when a note is played and at what velocity, what strength, as well as any effects that were on the note at that time of it being played. And sequencers can be standalone programs. They can be built directly into musical instruments. They can also be independent pieces of hardware.

So you could have a sequencer that is its own individual electronic unit and you plug into it, or a sequencer could be built into a synthesizer, or a sequencer could be a piece of software running on a computer. You have lots of different options. So let's say you've got a MIDI enabled synthesizer and you want to record to a mid file. What else do you need? Well, if it's a keyboard that also has a MIDI sequencer in it, then you have a workstation. You've got everything

you need right there. You could just record it to the device. If it's not if it's a synthesizer that has a mini output but does not have a mini sequencer itself, you could get a hardware sequence. Those tend to be a little expensive, but you get what you pay for. You can find low cost software sequencers on a computer, and then you could hook up your synthesizer via cable to the computer, depending upon how old we're talking, Like if you're using an ancient synthesizer and an ancient computer,

you'll be using a specific MIDI cable for that. These days we mostly use USB. I'll tell you more about cables in just a minute. And you can look at all sorts of options in between, so expensive hardware, cheap software, and then there's a whole bunch of different stuff and in between also keyboards that have the MIDI sequencers built into them. Those can range from being fairly reasonably priced

to really expensive. If you want something that is top of the line, We're talking hundreds of dollars in those cases. But that's the kind of stuff that professionals will use if they are arranging music and they're trying to record stuff. Some older MIDI keyboards could push MIDI data out through a port, but wouldn't play sound while doing so, so instead you'd have to listen to the music as it

plays on your computers. Sound card sound cards used to be a much bigger deal back in the nineties, back when putting together a computer could become an enormous headache because you had lots of choices in graphics cards, sound cards, CPUs. Not all of them were compatible with each other, so sometimes you would find that the build you had selected didn't actually work because there were incompatibilities between the various components. It was a nightmare. But those days are mostly behind us.

These days, it's a lot easier to build a machine, and it's the need for a discrete sound card has decreased because computers can handle a lot of this using their standard hardware these days, but back in the nineties you needed very specific types of hardware. Rowland made an amazing sound card. I had a uh the sound the sound Blaster sound card, but there were tons of different sound cards that came out in that time period. UM good old creative labs Man, so these days not so

much a big deal. But back in those days, those sound cards had ports on them where you could plug in a MIDI cable. The connectors were these, uh appropriately enough called MIDI cables. They were a five prong DN connector d I N connector. So what does d I N stand for. HYAN stands for Deutsch Institute for Norman. Of course, that, by the way, as a national standards organization in Germany and the one that defined this particular

standard for connectors. And there are a lot of different orientations for d I N connectors, not just the MIDI style. Their tons different variations, including different layouts for five pin connectors, but standard MIDI cables all have the same orientation because it's a standard. These cables didn't send variable voltage signals. So the old analog synthesizers, the way they generated music

was all through varying voltage. That was kind of the secret sauce if you want to get down to the basic level of what's happening from an electronic standpoint, it's all about varying voltage to get different effects and create different sounds. But that's not how many synthesizers communicate. All the information that mini synthesizers send is in binary that's a zero or a one. With such a basic system,

you don't have to vary voltage. You just have to have either voltage applied, which would be like a one, or no voltage applied, which would be a zero. Mini messages, like I said, are in the form of bytes or eight bits. Coding with Mini tends to be done in hexadecimal format, which represents nibbles, and nibble is half of a byte, so it's four bits. So with every four bits you can use that to create a hexadecimal figure.

Hexadecimal is um base sixteen. I mentioned it in a previous podcast, and the way you express base sixteen is after you get past the number ten, you typically start using letters like abc, etcetera. Uh So hexadecimal makes it easier to understand what each of those nibbles happens to be.

It's easier to understand that compared to just looking at zeros or ones um As it turns out, eventually you wouldn't have to worry about even working in hexadecimal because you would get MIDI editing software that would have a graphic user interface or COUEY, so you no longer had to worry about even looking at just lists of hexadecimal figures, which would cause me to get a really severe headache and cry. So I'm glad that that's not a thing anymore.

The MIDI protocol supports bit data rates of up to thirty one two d fifty bits per second. Information on a MIDI cable is strictly one way only, so if you I to have two way communication between various components, you would have to have two cables. Media equipment from this early era tends to have multiple ports with labels like in, out, and through. Now those labels tell you which direction information will flow from that port through a MIDI cable, So out means that data will move out

from that port. If you connect a cable to that port, information will go out over that cable, and then you would connect the other end of that cable into the inport of some other MIDI component. So let's say I've got a controller and I want to hook it up to a drum pad my controller, I would hook the cable to the outport, and in the drum pad, I would connect that to the import. That way, all the instructions I play on the controller will go out and into the drum pad. The through port, by the way,

duplicates anything that's coming in through the in port. And the reason for that is if you want two hook up a bunch of components in sequence, and you want all of them to follow the exact same set of instructions, then you hook up your MIDI controller to the outport, put it into the first device in its import, then hook up a second cable to that devices through port into a second devices import, and then both device one and two will follow the same set of instructions because

the second device is copying the same set of instructions that the first one is getting from your controller. And not every device out there a mini enabled device has all of these ports, some of them only have imports, some of them only have outports. It just depends upon what the device is and how expensive it is, because the more features you add to these gadgets typically the more expensive they get, so because you're adding extra components

into the electronic device. These days, as you may encounter MIDI controllers and synthesizers that use USB or Universal Serial Bus connectors instead of those standard MIDI cables. Those MIDI cables are are more or less a thing of the past unless you're using antiquated equipment these days, and that's because many of these devices have an integrated MIDI interface that can accept the digital information directly without the need

for that special cable. The information itself remains the same, only the the delivery of the information has changed, so the type of data hasn't changed at all, it's just the way it gets from point A to point B. The quality of a MIDI playback depends heavily upon the equipment you're using to play the file, So if you have a super sweet MIDI enabled keyboard, the quality should be pretty darn good. If you're using a cheap piece of technology with a weedy sound processing capability, it might

be less impressive. So for a long time, the m I D mid file format was the preferred one for cell phone ring tones. The files took up a small amount of space and could allow a phone to play all sorts of songs, including popular ones everyone knows, and not just a dozen or so default ring tones that seemed to come with every phone. These days, storage space on phones is not as big a concern, and a lot of ringtones use other file formats, including MP three files.

So Mini is not as big a deal on phones anymore, but it still has its place where Well I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Why did the Mini protocols become a standard. Well, remember that Dave Smith created the first protocol in three and at that time computers and related equipment had a limited ability to handle data transfers, so this was an era

before broadband and high speed data transfer cables. The Mini protocols allowed musicians to create detailed instructions on how a performance should be played and send it in manageable chunks of data, either to a computer or to other musical instruments. It was an elegant solution for a particularly tricky problem. The Atari ST, which debuted in February, featured a built in MIDI port and supported mini sequencer software, bringing the

ability to record music into the home studio. This was a huge shift from the norm where you'd have to rely upon a professional recording space to lay down tracks. Now, with the right MIDI controllers and atri e st, you could create your own musical masterpiece, and other computers followed suit, and plenty of sound card manufacturers included support for mini connections.

In addition, many allowed people to record on multiple channels, and then, because the data was all digital, you can mess with it after you recorded it, so you could not only tweak instructions to play back at a different pitch or a different tempo. You could also copy and paste sections, making a short drum track repeat the entire length of a piece of music, for example, or you could grab a section of music and shift it to

a different place along the overall piece. You can mix up a track, You can mash it with other mini tracks and come up with all sorts of interesting effects. Using a software based synthesizer, also known as a soft scent, you can create virtual instruments. These software packages tend to have massive options in them, allowing you to replicate the sound of specific instruments just by selecting a few options.

Using such a synthesizer, you could choose to play back a guitar riff on a synthesized nineteen four Fender stratocaster or a nineteen fifty eight Gibson E S three thirty five or even a Cordoba C three M classical guitar, or let's say you want the keyboard part played on a classic Moge synthesizer, complete with all the faders and knobs. A good soft Scent package will contain emulators for hundreds of different instruments, complete with all the options they came with.

Plus they frequently will offer up additional features that can be applied to the sound beyond what the instruments would support. Natively, the MIDI standard has had several revisions since its introduction. They tend to be backwards compatible with earlier versions, but not necessarily interoperable with each other. Think of them as branching pathways. For example, Roland created Roland's General Standard or Roland GS to add in additional instruments and features not

supported by the original MIDI protocol. Yamaha did something similar with the Yamaha's Extended General MIDI or x G. Both were compatible with the first generation of MIDI protocols, but they were not compatible with each other, and so there was a bit of splintering and what was meant to be a universal standard. Other refinements to the standard allow for things such as tying MIDI files to show controls

like lighting or motion controls. You could create a sequence of lighting cueues tightly coupled with sound cues, this way automating the entire sequence. These sort of features are useful and everything from theatrical presentations to crazy parties. I imagine never get invited to crazy parties, but I've been to a lot of musicals. Other specifications allowed users to incorporate downloadable sounds into MIDI sequences or use alternate tunings for

synthesized instruments. Now normally, these refinements were the result of collaborative efforts among various synthesizer manufacturers, so the MIDI standard is continuing to evolve today. People are still working on adding in features, and by people I mean mostly various companies that are interested parties in continuing the MIDI protocols.

So again it's seeing people that are typically competitors get together to create a standard that works across multiple pieces of hardware and that benefits the end user the most. It has really changed the world of music production. Back in the old days, you had to try and get big enough so that some studio will take a chance on you and allow you time inside a actual recording studio to lay down some tracks, or you would have to pay an exorbitant amount of money in order to

do so. Now, with a small, relatively small investment up front, you can make a recording studio of your own and lay down all sorts of tracks. Now you are limited in what your track is ultimately going to sound like based upon the type of playback equipment you can afford. The better the equipment, the better your your MIDI file

will sound when it's played back. Otherwise, if you're playing it back on something that's fairly primitive, it's gonna sound like it came out of a cheap imitation instrument, not a really well synthesized instrument. Now, if that's the effect you're going for, it's not a big deal. Like if want to have sort of a retro kind of kitchy simulated sound, that's not that's not a big problem. But if you want something that sounds like, hey, that sounds like that's a real cello, then you want to shell

out the big bucks. I can actually still pick out fake stringed instruments on even high profile uh types of of soundtracks and scores and movies in particular, I'm looking at you Pirates of the Caribbean and your synthesized string sections. I hear it, but it's really really good, much better

than it used to be. So the MIDI format has been incredible because again, it was such an elegant solution, creating instructions on how to recreate a performance rather than recording an existing performance and then being able to tweak that performance in any way you want, so that you can make it better than the original playthrough was, or at least different. It's really interesting to me. So I want to thank Jesse for the suggestion. I really appreciate it.

We're gonna be doing a lot of episodes based off listeners suggestions over the next few weeks, and we're gonna do some more about music in the next couple of episodes. Think of it as a mini music arc of tech stuff episodes, because I kind of wanted a group together thematically linked topics. So we'll talk more about music in the next episode. But that's all for Midy for today. If you have suggestions for future episodes, maybe you want to get your suggestion in, like Jesse did, send me

an email. The address for the show is text Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle at both of those is tech stuff h s W. Remember we have an Instagram account and you can follow us on there and see all sorts of cool behind the scenes photos plus relevant information that relates back to technology in general and this show in particular. And on Wednesdays and Fridays, I stream my recording sessions live on twitch

dot tv slash tech stuff. I would be happy to have you join us. We have a chat room in there. You can join in there and chat with me and talk about how I mispronounced words and make fun of me, or you can, you know, give me encouraging words too. I don't just take abuse. I also I also like it when people are nice to me. And I hope that you will join us there and I'll talk to you again really soon. YEA for moral this and thousands of other topics. Is that how staff works dot com.