What is MIDI? I looked at wiki but...?

Question

I mean it generally defined as cheesy "low fi" music coming from your computer?

Answer 1

Midi was developed to allow electronic intruments from all different manufacturers to communicate. For example, three drum machines and 4 synths could all be synchronised to play together no matter the brands. Midi uses a 5 pin din cable but only 3 pins are active.

There are different modes of midi for different uses in different circumstances. Midi can be used to start/stop/keep in time an instrument like a drum machine or be used to control exactly the notes played by a keyboard, or control the parameters of these instruments or effects units etc. etc.

The only computer I know of that comes with midi is the old (great) Atari ST1040.

There is sooo much more to know but this is a basic overview. I hope this helps

Answer 2

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is a way for an electronic instrument to interact with a digital machine such as a computer or other interface.



MIDI records data and not actually music and instruments are assigned to that data. The data is recorded by how loud, long and what note is being played. The sound you hear is whatever is assigned to that MIDI data. So if you're playing through a computer, you connect a MIDI keyboard to play a sound from an instrument but MIDI alone has no sound.



MIDI can really be whatever you want or have available on a music program, MIDI keyboard, or any other instrument that accepts MIDI in

Answer 3

The quick, somewhat metaphorical answer ... have you ever seen one of those old style "player pianos" like great-great-grandma had? They had rolls of paper with holes punched in it, and the paper was drawn over a mechanical device that depressed a piano key whenever there was a hole at that spot on the paper -- for example, a long hole toward the left side of the paper might mean a bass whole note, whereas a small hole in the middle might mean a quarter note middle C.



MIDI is kinda like that system of recording music. It's the modern day computer equivalent of the standard defining how those holes are supposed to be placed on the paper, etc. Except that unlike piano rolls, MIDI can also record volume information, pitch glides, etc. It's also a standard for not just how music is electronically recorded as notes, but also for how electronic instruments communicate -- so, you can have the notes recorded in a MIDI sequence on your PC but play it through your keyboard, etc.



Now, what would happen if you took one of those piano rolls and played it on a piece-of-crap piano? It would sound like crap. That's essentially what happens with built-in MIDI softsynths bundled with operating systems; they're just barely good enough to put out recognizable notes, but that's it. But that's not "MIDI's fault" -- it just means the player itself is bad. If you want better examples of what MIDI can do, look at some demos by softsynth vendors. They won't be showing off MIDI per se, they'll be using MIDI to show off *their* products, but it should still be a demonstration that MIDI != crap.



Garritan has some pretty good demos online. Also, if you want to explore MIDI further, you might want to think about getting a basic sequencer/mixer package, like those offered by Cakewalk and similar companies. (I don't work for either company, etc., but have software from both places and use it quite a bit).

Answer 4

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface (or sometimes Musical Instrument Data Interface). It was originally designed to allow one MIDI-enabled instrument to control other MIDI-enabled instruments, but with the advances in PCs it's made its way to the forefront of computer-based music. The data that MIDI sends and receives is really very limited; it has to be so the whole system can operate as fast as possible. It's things like note-on, note-off, pitch, velocity (basically volume), channel, bank, and patch. Channel, bank, and patch are for picking what instrument is playing (sounds, called patches, are grouped into banks). High-end PC music production software, called sequencers or digital audio workstations (DAW), uses MIDI for virtually everything, and these are the tools most often used for things like movie, TV show, and video game soundtracks (although higher budget projects tend to use live performers in orchestral scores).



The cheesy low fi music isn't exactly MIDI (although that's how it starts out). It's really just the less-than spectacular FM synthesizer and/or wave table chip that comes with most basic sound cards. If you don't have an external synth or software synth to receive the MIDI signal your sound card can use it's own built-in FM synth or wave table, which has very limited capabilities and generally sounds bad.

Answer 5

A MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) file contains no music. It records how music is played, containing "events" which control when each note of each instrument starts, finishes, how loud, what note of the scale, etc. It has to be played by the synthesiser section of a sound card, or a MIDI instrument of some kind. It will sound like the particular instrument that is playing it.



A .WAV file contains a digitally sampled recording of an actual sound, be it music, speech whatever. It is played by the DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter) of a sound card, in the same way that a CD player plays the data from a CD. It will always sound like the original sound that was recorded.



A MIDI file is very compact, a .WAV file will be very large in comparison.

Answer 6

MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is the interface used to connect electronic musical equipment (synths,drums,etc.) to computers. Because it is so hi-fi, and versatile it is also used for other types of musical data transfer (soundboards, stereos). It has nothing to do with the music, just how the music is moved from one device to another.