MIDI Flashcards
1
Q
What does MIDI stand for?
A
- Musical Instrument Digital Interface
2
Q
What is MIDI?
A
- Communications protocol that allows electronic musical instruments to interact with each other
3
Q
What does the MIDI protocol use?
A
- 8-bit serial transmission with one start bit and one stop bit, and is therefore asynchronous
4
Q
What does a MIDI file consist of?
A
- a list of commands that instruct a device how to produce a particular sound or musical note
5
Q
What does each MIDI command have?
A
- a specific sequence of bytes
6
Q
What is the first byte and what does it do?
A
- it is the status byte and it informs the MIDI device what function to perform
7
Q
What is encoded in the status byte?
A
- the MIDI channel
8
Q
What does MIDI operate on?
A
- 16 different channels , which are numbered 0 to 15
9
Q
What are some examples of MIDI commands?
A
- note on / off - indicates that a key has been pressed/ released to produce / stop producing a musical note
- key pressure - indicates how hard the key has been pressed
10
Q
Which two additional bytes are required?
A
- a pitch byte - tells the MIDI device which note to play
- a velocity byte - tells the device how loud to play the note
11
Q
What happens when music or sound is recorded on a computer system?
A
- these MIDI messages are saved in a file which is
recognized by the file extension .mid.
12
Q
What happens if the mid. file is played back through a musical instrument?
A
- such as an electronic keyboard, the music will be played back in an identical way to the original
13
Q
How would somebody play back through an instrument?
A
- one would need the use of sequencer software, since the MIDI files wouldn’t be recognized in their ‘raw’ form
14
Q
Why are MIDI files considerably smaller than an MP3 file?
A
- they don’t contain any audio tracks
