Thanks for posting, Herb. On 6/9/2022 11:47 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/arts/music/dave-smith-dead.html
Tonight I had a taste for some MIDI music. In searching the Web for it, I came across this obituary of Dave Smith, who passed a week ago. Known as a synthesizer designer of the late 70's, turns out he collaborated with Roland to create the MIDI specification.
This is a little out of my interests; but MIDI is really familiar to anyone who did personal computing and digital audio instruments in the 80's. Maybe arcade games too, that's how they sounded.
MIDI is both a simple cabling and serial interface to connect digital audio instruments to a computer; and a specification for codes to represent instruments, tones and duration. Something between sheet music and a piano roll. The instrument renditions are pretty simple: square and triangular waveforms with envelopes. Not a hard program to write in 8-bit assembler, a simple D/A, even a 1-bit R/C network.
It's incredibly data-compact to represent a song by notes and instruments. That mattered with 70's and 80's computers and later with consumer electronic piano keyboards, drumsets, etc. But to this day, a Web browser and most audio playback programs can play a MIDI file.
So I thought I'd give a shout-out as I'm listening to a MIDI theme from Duke Nukem. MIDI piano works pretty well too, there's lots of piano-roll to MIDI out there. So a Scott Joplin tune from 1902, realized in MIDI, sounds alright. Or Gershwin! 89K bytes:
https://www.midis101.com/free_midi/68230/Gershwin__Medley_From_An_American_I...
regards, Herb