musical instrument digital interface

MIDI

 in full Musical Instrument Digital Interface

Protocol for transmission of musical data between digital components, such as synthesizers and a computer's sound card. MIDI uses 8-bit asynchronous serial transmission with a data rate of 31.25 kilobytes per second. The transmitted data do not directly represent musical sound but specify various aspects (pitch, loudness, starting and stopping points in time). The data are then applied to waveforms stored digitally on a computer chip to create a specific sound.

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musical instrument digital interface [‚myü·zi·kəl ¦in·strə·mənt ‚dij·ə·dəl ′in·tər‚fās]

(computer science)

The digital standard for connecting computers, musical instruments, and synthesizers.

A compression format for encoding music. Abbreviated MIDI.

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(music, hardware, protocol, file format)

Musical Instrument Digital Interface - (MIDI /mi'-dee/, /mee'-dee/) A hardware specification and protocol used to communicate note and effect information between synthesisers, computers, music keyboards, controllers, and other electronic music devices. It is basically a high-speed serial connection with separate connections for MIDI in, MIDI out and MIDI through (to allow devices to be chained). The basic unit of information is a "note on/off" event which includes a note number (pitch) and key velocity (loudness). There are many other message types for events such as pitch bend, patch changes and synthesizer-specific events for loading new patches etc. There is a file format for expressing MIDI data which is like a dump of data sent over a MIDI port. The MIME type "audio/midi" isn't actually registered so it should probably be "audio/x-midi". Filename extension: .mid or .midi http://update.uu.se/~vick/Coordinator.html. Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.music.midi, news:alt.music.midi.