MIDI Pre-work

Question 1

What does MIDI stand for?

Answer 1

Musical Instrument Digital Interface

Question 2

What is the purpose of MIDI?

Answer 2

Is a technical standard that includes hardware specifications and a protocol for electronic musical instrument communication, in order to produce and manipulate music

Question 3

How does MIDI work?

Answer 3

Sound synthesisers are used to create electronic sounds, which are captured and encoded as a MIDI file by a MIDI interface, using event messages

Question 4

Describe how event messages are used in MIDI, including examples

Answer 4

Event messages explain what notes must be played, when they must be player and for how long and how loud.

Means MIDI files don’t store a digital representation of analogue sound, only signals that can be used to produce sound.

e.g digital signals specifying note/pitch/intensity, control signals for parameters like volume and vibrato, clock signals to set tempo

Question 5

What are the advantages of using MIDI to represent music?

Answer 5

• MIDI files use less storage space than an equivalent sampled recording.
• Performance data can be easily manipulated, e.g pitch or duration of a note can be changed, note can be set to be played by a different instrument