MIDI: The Email of Musical Instruments
A fictional dialogue explaining the fundamentals of MIDI
Welcome back to Laptop Music Weekly!
Introducing… a series where I cover the fundamentals of MIDI, a communication protocol for digital music instruments and computers. It’s at the heart of how music is produced today. It’s super cool, and I’d love for you to learn about it—even if you aren’t a music producer.
To make things a little more entertaining, I’ve decided to turn this explainer series into a fictional dialogue between Toni Able, a young aspiring music producer, and Roland Prophet, a retired fictional music instrument inventor who witnessed the development of the MIDI specification back in the early 1980s.
Toni: Hi there! I keep running into this file type in Ableton called MIDI—it seems like it’s kind of built into the software. I’m impatient and just want to dive into my creative projects, so I’ve never really bothered to figure out what it does or where it came from. Is it worth learning about?
Roland: Absolutely! I witnessed the development of MIDI back in the early 1980s, so you’ve come to the right person. MIDI is truly a magical thing, and I’m amazed at how long it has lasted. We created MIDI to solve a huge problem in music tech: compatibility. By the late 1970s, synthesizers were transitioning from analog to digital. It was a big shift.
Synthesizers were increasingly built with microprocessors, but every manufacturer—Roland, Yamaha, Moog, Oberheim, Sequential Circuits—was creating their own systems, and none of them could talk to each other. That was a shame because one of the strengths of microprocessors is how easily they can communicate. MIDI was an effort to bring everyone together and create a shared standard, rather than working against each other.
Toni: So MIDI is like… a common language for musical instruments?
Roland: Exactly! Before MIDI, connecting instruments was like trying to hold a conversation where everyone spoke a different language. Tower of Babel! MIDI standardized communication, allowing instruments to “talk” to each other no matter who made them. Imagine playing the keyboard of one synthesizer but hearing the sounds of another! That was the idea. Bear in mind, this was long before the personal computer, but sequencers—devices that recorded and played back digital music information—already existed.
Toni: OK, so you just said that musical instruments… talk to each other? How does this communication actually work? Instruments can’t talk, at least not last time I checked…
Roland: Perhaps it makes more sense to think of MIDI as the “email” of music. Just like email is a communication protocol for sending text, MIDI is a protocol for sending musical performance instructions. These instructions, called MIDI Messages, can be understood by almost any digital instrument. MIDI itself doesn’t make a sound—it just tells an instrument how and what to play, like “Play C4 at velocity 110.”
Toni: Oh wait, so MIDI doesn’t actually make a sound itself? It kind of does in Ableton.
Roland: Yes, but only if you connect it to an instrument, like a software synthesizer. MIDI just sends instructions. It’s just a set of commands that is sent to a musical instrument, which then acts upon them.
Toni: OK, I’m starting to get it. MIDI seems pretty cool. Also really amazing that this protocol is so old, dating back to the early 1980s, and is still in use today!
Roland: Yes, it really has endured! None of us anticipated that. I think part of its success is that it’s lightweight, versatile, and interoperable. By interoperability I mean musical instruments being able to talk to each other regardless of the manufacturer. But MIDI is also versatile: it can play sounds on virtually any digital instrument—keyboard, synth, you name it. It can even take an audio file and play bits of it as if it were an instrument—that’s the basis of sampling. MIDI can even control concert lighting or street lamps! Another strength of MIDI is that it’s lightweight: just like an email, MIDI files are tiny—often under 50 kilobytes—because they only store instructions, not audio. Fun fact: MIDI is so lightweight that today you can send MIDI wirelessly using Bluetooth! No more cables. Isn’t that cool?
Toni: That is really cool. How do I do that?
Roland: You need a device called WIDI Master. It’s a game-changer.
Toni: I need to try that. OK, once I have the MIDI in Ableton, though, I’m looking at all these horizontal bars in what’s called the MIDI editor. Why does it look the way it does?
Roland: That’s the piano roll, the most common way to visualize MIDI today. Though Ableton doesn’t really call it a piano roll. It’s actually just one way of visualizing MIDI. Early on, the common interface was event lists—a sort of cascading text matrix where every row represented a MIDI event. A little similar to how the UI of personal computers used to be the command line. Another way of representing MIDI was through traditional sheet music. But the piano roll prevailed because it’s so intuitive. You can drag, duplicate, transpose, and edit notes easily, making it perfect for modern producers. Some producers are lighting fast at MIDI editing.
Toni: Yeah I use a lot of shortcuts to speed up my workflow. I don’t actually play an instrument. I just click in MIDI notes and let the computer play them back.
Roland: That’s one of MIDI’s strengths features. When you program MIDI, you’re essentially bypassing the need for a human performer. You’re telling the instrument exactly what to do, and it just executes—like an automaton.
Toni: What’s an automaton?
Roland: An automaton is a self-playing machine. Think of player pianos, where punched rolls of paper controlled the keys. MIDI works the same way but in a digital context. Instruments become the performers.
Toni: Is that why some people say that MIDI sounds robotic and reminds them of Tetris music?
Roland: Right. What people are probably referring to is quantization, which snaps notes to a grid for perfect timing. This can feel mechanical, unlike human performances that have subtle variations in tempo and timing. That said, most DAWs have tools that allow you to “humanize” a MIDI sequence by adding slight timing and velocity changes for a more natural feel. Plus, features like aftertouch, pitch bend, and the recent introduction of MPE make MIDI increasingly expressive.
Toni: So expressivity is a “problem” for MIDI that needs solving?
Roland: Sort of, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Toni: Thanks, Roland. I’ll never look at a MIDI file the same way again.
Roland: My pleasure. Now go make some music!
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Da seh ich gleich wie viel ich von dir gelernt habe :)
based and Hofstadter-pilled