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MIDI, a standard for digital music since 1981, has been updated to MIDI 2.0. New MIDI 2.0 is not dependent on any particular hardware implementation such as USB or Ethernet. Some of the main goals of the new protocol are to provide higher resolution, more channels, and improved performance and expressiveness. Another change is a move from a byte stream to data packets.
MIDI 2.0 is designed to "deliver an unprecedented level of nuanced musical and artistic expressiveness," and leans on three key design decisions to do so. Firstly its new 32-bit resolution makes for smoother, continuous, analogue feel - if you want that. Controllers will be easy to use and there will be more of them. Lastly major timing advances are present in the standard.
Also at the MIDI Association's press release, Details about MIDI 2.0™, MIDI-CI, Profiles and Property Exchange.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday January 31 2020, @11:17PM (2 children)
Very, very, very basic question -- I know it has to do with digital representations of music, but where does it fit in between a sheet of music with notes on it, an electronic keyboard, and a physical piano? Maybe I need a much more basic understanding of sound generation and representation, but pointers would be appreciated in any case.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 01 2020, @12:09AM
The quick rundown is that MIDI is primarily a control protocol and secondarily a hardware implementation.
It doesn't generate any sounds by itself, but it sends control signals to an instrument or software that generates the tones. I have a Yamaha KX49 that looks like a decent-sized Casio keyboard but can't be played aloud by turning it on, as it is designed to send only control signals to something else. These classes of instruments are called controllers and can be your traditional piano style or can take the forms of percussion pads and 2-D touchpads or wah-wah-style guitar pedals. Some instruments that can generate tones can and do also function as controllers. Some models of automated stage lights, for example, can also receive MIDI signals and control the stage lights from those control signals.
The name of the numbers game with original MIDI is that every fucking thing ranges in value from 0-127. This means that Midi's tonal range is 128 notes total (a full-size piano has 88 notes). Each physical MIDI link allows up to 16 channels, for the sake of this discussion each "channel" could be considered a virtual instrument. For example, you have a keyboard controller and want to play bass guitar with the left hand and piano with the right hand. You can set up a "split" to transmit the bass portion of the keyboard to channel 3 and the piano portion to channel 4. With each channel you get 128 continuous control channels. The controllers such as X-Y pads and wah-style guitar pedals are not used to play notes, they're designed to send continuous control data (again, valued from 0-127) to perform modulations like panning or the cutoff frequency of your high-pass filter. When you see somebody tweeking a knob on a modern keyboard, chances are that knob's been assigned a CC value and is altering some aspect of the sound.
There are some standard magical numbers involved. Midi channel 10 is typically used as the drum channel and each "drum" corresponds to a certain musical note played (for example, note #35 is the bass drum and #38 is the snare drum). Continuous controller 10 is the pan position and controllers 7 and 11 both control volume.
All of the "magic numbers" in the paragraph above can be changed according to the whims of the musician. The beauty of MIDI is that it is configurable, but this can also be a bad thing -- I once purchased a guitar amp with a MIDI input, but their implementation of MIDI was non-standard so that they could justify selling you their own equally-expensive foot controller. So in that case it was a matter of working within the MIDI spec but also having to brute-force commands to figure out their implementation of MIDI. After I went to the forums and saw that other users were sharing tips on which commands did what, the forum was frozen by the manufacturer. Fucking bastards.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by https on Saturday February 01 2020, @12:35AM
Basically, a sequence of notes and their timings, plus shitloads of extra control data. It's straightforward to translate a traditional score sheet to midi, but sometimes not so easy in reverse because of the extra data. What's the musical notation for panning left to right to centre, anyways?
MIDI abstracts away the music that an instrument makes into the actions required to make that happen - play the notes in this order, slide the trombone this much, hit the snare this fast... and a bunch of other things, like feed this much to the mixer or the reverb tank, apply tremolo, pan, pianissimo, etc. Once you have it recorded, you can edit it. The most commonly done edit is called quantization (algorithmic correction of rhythm errors), and one of the more notable thing you can do is specify what instrument should get these actions? If you're a piano player, you can send it to a synthesizer with a reasonable approximation of a guitar or oboe. Or of a Steinway, or of a upright piano in the back of the bar covered in beer and peanut shells inside. I'm not going to judge you (out loud).
A MIDI synthesizer often has a keyboard controller (like a piano) - and the data of the synthesizer and the keyboard can be combined and recorded by various music software. You can then send the resulting MIDI data to another synthesizer (which may or may not have a physical keyboard built in) and it makes the sounds.
It's not often you get a protocol in steady use for almost four decades. The original spec was really, really well planned.
Offended and laughing about it.