Monday, January 28, 2008

MIDI Programming for beginners: What is MIDI?

I'm going to write about the first step in MIDI programming and what those fancy term means.

What is MIDI? Often times my answer is "It is like a sheet music with performance information"

Any good sheet music will include marking like f (forte) p (piano), crescendo, ritardando but none of them actually gives you an idea of what it really sound like.. what composer meant. what arranger meant when they put those marks on the score.

On the other hand, MIDI records (or at least tries to capture) all that little nuances that composers were dying to put to their scores.

You can listen to free MIDI files somewhere and you should be able to tell differences. Some of them will have unnatural flow or no emotion and make you think "MIDI is horrible," but often times it is not MIDI that's is bad. Programmer.

MIDI will let you compose or play your own music even if you didn't know anything about music but on the other hand making it sound realistic or as if somebody is playing is very hard to do, especially when you are trying to get that "orchestra" sound; you have to know how all the instruments are played, sounds and talk with each other.