MIDI succeeded because its inventors gave it away
In the early 1980s a Roland keyboard could not talk to a Yamaha or an Oberheim; each maker guarded its own connection scheme. Roland's president and a Californian synth builder decided the industry needed one shared language, and that it had to be free. Their design from 1983 is still in use.
Ikutaro Kakehashi, who ran Roland, believed incompatible systems such as CV/gate and DIN sync were holding the electronic music business back. In June 1981 he suggested a standard to Tom Oberheim, but found Oberheim's own parallel bus too clumsy, so he turned to Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits for something simpler and cheaper. While Smith canvassed American firms, Kakehashi lobbied Yamaha, Korg and Kawai. Only Sequential and the Japanese companies bit. Building on a Roland interface, Smith and engineer Chet Wood presented a Universal Synthesizer Interface that October. Kakehashi wanted to call the result UMI, pronounced you-me; Smith found that a little corny but liked swapping synthesizer for instrument.
At the Winter NAMM show in 1983 Smith linked a Prophet 600 to a Roland synthesizer, and the specification appeared that August. The first MIDI drum machine, the TR-909, and the first MIDI sequencer arrived the same year. Smith insisted it could only work if every manufacturer adopted it, so they had to give it away, and the BBC later called it an early example of open-source technology. Kakehashi and Smith received Technical Grammy Awards in 2013.
The trick is that MIDI sends instructions rather than sound. Pressing a key, turning a knob or moving a slider becomes an event describing pitch, timing and velocity, and one cable carries up to sixteen channels. Because a recording is a list of commands, a composer can change its key, tempo or instruments, reorder sections or fix single notes, which audio cannot allow. Sequencing let people without notation skills build complex arrangements, allowed a duo to sound like a band, and helped make home recording practical.
The standard kept evolving, gaining General MIDI song files in 1991 and USB support, and MIDI 2.0 was unveiled at the 2020 Winter NAMM show. In 2022 the Guardian judged it as important to music as USB is to computing.
Source: MIDI
