The 2023 NAMM Show will celebrate two of history's most impactful musical innovations: the 40th anniversary of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) with MIDI@40 and the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, with Hip-Hop@50. Each day of the show, which takes place April 13–15, in Anaheim, California, will offer the intertwined stor...

The MIDI Association and MIDI Association members were at CES in Las Vegas The MIDI Association has had a long relationship with CES as an Affiliated Association.    CES helps to support organizations that maintain technical standards like MIDI.  At the 2023 CES show, there were a number of MIDI Association companies that also p...

MIDI in 1983 - It seems to work, but what's next? In Chapter 6 of the History of MIDI, we left off with the demonstration of MIDI at the 1983 NAMM show.   John Bowen, head of sound design for Sequential had recounted that he had been busy finishing the presets for the Prophet 600 and that although Sequential had tested the Prophet 60...

Dave Smith was born in San Francisco in 1950 and like Dave Rossum grew up in the Bay Area in the 1950s.  He took piano lessons as a child and started playing bass and guitar in rock bands in high school because it was after all the 1960s in San Francisco.  When the record Switched on Bach came out in 1968, Dave bo...

Roger Linn was born in Whittier, California in 1955.  Roger learn to play guitar growing up in the 1960s and when he was in high school, he started messing around with electronics.  While in high school I modified a fuzz tone product called the Foxx Tone Machine with some simple filters to make it s...

MIDI Association partner AudioCipher Technologies has just published Version 3.0 of their melody and chord progression generator plugin. Type in a word or phrase and AudioCipher will automatically generate MIDI files for any virtual instrument in your DAW. AudioCipher helps you overcome creative block with the first ever text-to-MIDI VST for music ...

 Tom Oberheim was born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1936.  In junior high school, he started building HiFi amplifiers for friends probably based on the same articles in Popular Mechanics that his contemporaries Bob Moog (1934) and Don Buchla (1937) were reading.   He was also listening to a lot of Jazz music ...

Acknowledgement of the people who made these articles possible Before we dive into the history of the creation of MIDI,  we wanted to acknowledge the key people who made this official history of the birth of MIDI possible.  These are people who were directly involved with the creation of MIDI in its early days.  Some of these pe...

Analog Synths, Drum Machines, and Sequencers In the last chapter of the history of MIDI, we covered the early history of electronic musical instruments, the period from 1900 to 1963.   By the mid 1960's thanks to the work of Bob Moog, Alan Pearlman and Don Buchla, the concept of electronic Synthesizers, Drum Machines and Mu...

Dave Rossum is another one of the founders of the modern music production ecosystem and had a unique relationship with several other key synth figures including Dave Smith and Tom Oberheim.   In fact, it was core technologies that Dave developed that allowed Oberheim and Sequential Circuits polyphonic synthesizers to be develope...

Alan Robert Pearlman was born in 1925 (9 years before Bob Moog and 12 years before Don Buchla although he would outlive them both) and grew up in New York City.   Like many electronics buffs in the mid 20th century, he grew up making radios out of kits and schematics from Popular Mechanics.   He attended Worcester...

At almost the exact same time that Bob Moog was starting to make modular synths on the East Coast, Don Buchla was starting to make modular synths on the West Coast at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.  Buchla was born in Southern California in 1937 and studied physics and music at UC Berkeley graduating with as a physic major...

If you were forced to pick one single person who is responsible for the creation of the modern music production environment, Bob Moog would be a good choice.    He spans the era from the early days of synths to the post MIDI world and is arguably the most influential figure in synth history.    In researching...

The Register posted an article today about Firefox supporting Web MIDI.  MIDI was created by a small group of American and Japanese synthesiser makers. Before it, you could hook synths, drum machines and sequences together, but only through analogue voltages and pulses. Making, recording and especially touring electronic music was messy, ...

Are you exploring new ways for musicians to interact with digital musical instruments? Have an idea for an original electronic instrument or controller? Trying to raise investment or attract attention for a new product? If you're looking to make waves in music technology, you need to know about The MIDI Innovation Awards. In 2023, MIDI celebrates i...

Tapis Magique is a pressure-sensitive, knitted electronic textile carpet that generates three-dimensional sensor data based on body postures and gestures and drives an immersive sonic environment in real-time. Demonstrating an organic and expressive relationship between choreography and music has been a never-ending feat in the performance arts, as...

Some of you may be aware that Don Lewis passed away the week of Nov 7, 2022.  Don was a synthesis pioneer who created a hardware platform for controlling banks of Synthesizers (Oberheim, Arp 2600s) prior to MIDI, which he called LEO (Live Electronic Orchestra). Mr. Kakehashi of Roland worked with Don starting in 1969 and cr...

MIDI Association members Wizdom Music and moForte are proud to announce the release of the new Naada Instruments for GeoShred. As with all GeoShred instruments, these are models of the physics of the instrument. They are expressive and interactive.  These instruments can be played from the expressive GeoShred Keyboard, an MPE controller, ...

The MIDI Association will be presenting two very important sessions at the Audio Developers Conference in 2022  There are two very important MIDI Association sessions for developers at ADC 2022 described below. Those sessions are important because since adopting the core MIDI 2.0 specifications in January of ...

November 1, 2022 - The Association of Musical Electronics Industries (AMEI), the organization that oversees the MIDI specification in Japan, has committed to funding the development of an open-source USB MIDI 2.0 Host Driver for Windows Operating Systems under a memorandum of understanding between AMEI, AmeNote Inc, and Microsoft. AMEI is underwrit...

CME Pro, the small-scale innovator and contributing board member of the MIDI Association, is pleased to announce the world's first hybrid MIDI-thru-box with premium Bluetooth MIDI. Following the successful launch of its WIDI technology, CME is taking the next step with the introduction of WIDI Thru6 BT as the latest addition to the WIDI family. WID...

Hans Zimmer is one of the most famous and prolific film composer in the world.  He has composed music for over 150 films including blockbusters like The Lion King, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, the Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk.  In a recent interview with ...

Almost two years ago, we set out to build a tool that could capture an idea and turn it into workable music. After a long period of developing machine learning models and getting the UI just right, I'm incredibly proud to say that we are ready to put our creation out into the world. That idea I had while on tour with my band, sitting in the back of...

A new generation of AI MIDI software has emerged over the past 5 years. Google, OpenAI, and Spotify have each published a free MIDI application powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. The MIDI Association reported on innovations in this space previously. Google's AI Duet, their Music Transformer, and Massive Technolo...