Music Accessibility Standard Special Interest Group kicks off with a Youtube Live Stream Members of the Music Accessibility Standard Special Interest Group (MAS SIG) outlined their vision for the future of Music Accessibility in a Youtube Live event on the MIDI Association Youtube channel.  Musicians and producers who face accessibility c...

Check out Pete Brown's post on the Microsoft Dev blog for important updates on MIDI 2.0  Pete is not just the designated representative to the MIDI Association for Microsoft, he is also the current chair of our Executive Board and an incredible evangelist for MIDI and particularly for MIDI 2.0.  Here are some of the topics ...

The MIDI association hosted a live roundtable discussion last week, featuring 2022 MIDI Award winners Krishna Chetan (Pitch Innovations), Henrik Langer (Instrument of Things), Markus Ruh (MusiKraken), and John Dingley (Digigurdy). Amongst the winning products you'll find the Somi-1 MIDI controller, a motion-sensor wearable that converts users' body...

MIDI has grown in importance in China as Chinese companies expand in both domestic and overseas markets The MIDI Association is tasked with promoting and managing MIDI specification for MIDI in every country in the world except Japan where the Association Of Music Electronics Industry (AMEI) is responsible for MIDI.  Thanks to the le...

Check out these in depth interviews with the winners of the 2022 MIDI Innovation Awards The MIDI Association invited the winners of the 2022 MIDI Innovation Awards to join this round table on May 20, 20323 to discuss the evolution of their award winning products, discuss how they work with MIDI and share their thoughts on MIDI 2.0.&n...

Hosted by MIDI In Music Education Working Group Chair, Lee Whitmore, VP of Education for Focusrite, the webinar featured virtual tours of several MIDI In Music Education institutions including Belmont University, Columbia University, Full Sail University and Riverside City College. The MIDI In Music Education Special Interest Group (SIG) formed in ...

May 6 at 10 am Pacific on Youtube The world broadcast premiere is scheduled for Saturday. May 6 at 10 am Pacific. Click on the Youtube link below to watch the trailer and signup for a notification. The MIDI@40 Concert on the Yamaha Grand Plaza stage on Saturday, April 15 2023 celebrated the incredible possibilities created by MIDI (Musical Ins...

At the April NAMM show, The MIDI Association honored the people who created the modern music production environment of synths, drum machines, and sequencers, including Bob Moog, Don Buchla, Ikutaro Kakehashi, Tsutomu Katoh, Roger Linn, Tom Oberheim, Alan Pearlman, Dave Rossum, and Dave Smith.  A significant portion of The MIDI Association boot...

At the 2022 June NAMM show, MIDI Association Executive Board member Lawrence Levine and President Athan Billias were invited to sit at the Broadjam table by MIDI Association supporter Roy Elkins. Roy's Broadjam team is experts in running different kinds of  voting for events.  They handle the voting for the TEC Aw...

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...

All kinds of companies, all kinds of devices One of the things that has always made MIDI unique in the world of standards is that no one owns MIDI and the MIDI Associations (AMEI in Japan and The MIDI Association in the rest of the world) don't sell anything.  We (AMEI and The MIDI Association) get companies to volunteer their s...

Early History KORG's founder, Tsutomu Katoh was born in Nagoya on August 28, 1926 (Taisho 15) to a merchant family that ran a livestock feed wholesale business along the Iida Highway. These were tough times in Japan. The Great Kanto Earthquake had hit the capital city of Tokyo directly in 1923, leaving 140,000 people dead and missing. The impact of...

GLASYS (Gil Assayas) was a winner of the MIDI Association's 2022 Innovation Awards for artistic installations. He's a keyboard player, composer, sound designer, and video content creator who currently performs live with Todd Rundgren's solo band. The internet largely knows GLASYS for his viral MIDI art and chiptune music. We spoke with Gil to ...

Newzik is a Paris based MIDI Association member that has a unique approach to notation.  They offer a range of notation products that focus on classical orchestral scores and are used by a number of world renown orchestras and ensembles.  One of the most interesting parts of Muzik's technology is their AI driven OMR technol...

The IASIG is an organization in partnership with the International Game Developer's Association (IGDA) and MIDI Association (TMA) that brings together experts to share their knowledge and help improve the state of the art in audio for games, websites, VR content, and other interactive performances. Our members share tips and techniques, study trend...

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...