Midi Turns 30: A revolutionary open music standard lives on.
In the early days of the analog synthesizer, there was no practical way to communicate between electronic instruments. Syncing one synth to another involved a lot of guess-and-check: listening carefully and waiting for beats to match up. Overtime, manufacturers like Korg, Roland, and Sequential Circuits began developing systems that would allow their products to interface with one another. These systems were far from perfect: the Control Voltage / Gate (CV / Gate) method, arguably the most successful, was still typically reduced to changing two parameters of a sound: its pitch and duration. A single MIDI link, by contrast, can carry information to as many as 16 separate devices. Or, better put, the MIDI link transmits information between these devices.
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via: The Verdge
