MIDI

Musical Instrument Digital Interface. No wonder it gets shortened, thats is a bit of a mouthful. The article called "An Introduction to MIDI" was really helpful. I had no real understanding of MIDI was or did or anything like that. But the article opened right away with 'Why MIDI matters', which pretty much made reading the rest of the article worthwhile. Without the understanding of what MIDI could do for me, the article would have truly fallen on deaf ears. One of the points made there that I really liked was that with MIDI you can play back your music instantly. Without that playback feature, we can't listen for mistakes. I know that during my notation project, the playback feature in Sibelius helped me catch several little mistakes, things like a missing sharp or flat, by ear, and easily correct them with the piano attached to the computer. Trying to compose without being able to hear as I went would have been a serious problem. It makes you wonder how any composer composed before computers; the anticipation of waiting to hear the finished masterpiece, and whether it actually sounded like what you thought it would, would probably kill me. MIDI allows you to attach a variety of instruments to a computer, play something, and then rearrange it or change the sound with the aid of a sequencer. It makes the world of musical possibilities endless, and lets creativity reign. The article also really broke down exactly what you need to operate everything, which I found really helpful. The second article looked at MIDI in a less technical way. It put MIDI into terms of a teacher as opposed to a computer programer. One thing that both articles really emphasized was that MIDI does not make noise itself, it just translates noise making signals between two programs. So MIDI is really more of a message sender, one that mainly makes music.