About MIDI

A Short Introduction To MIDI

MIDI is a simple binary protocol for communicating with synthesizers and other electronic music equipment.

It was developed in 1981 by Dave Smith and Chet Wood of Sequential Systems. MIDI was quickly embraced by all the major synth manufacturers and led to developments such as microcomputer sequencers, and with them the electronic home studio. Although many attempts have been made to replace it, it is still the industry standard.

MIDI was designed for the 8-bit micro controllers found in synthesizers at the beginning of the 80’s. As such, it is a very minimal byte-oriented protocol. The message for turning a note on is only three bytes long (here shown in hexadecimal):

92 3C 64

This message consists of:

92 -- 9 == message type note on
      2 == channel 2

3C -- note 60 (middle C)

64 -- velocity (how hard the note is hit)

The first byte is called a status byte. It has the upper bit set, which is how you can tell it apart from the following data bytes. Data bytes are thus only 7 bits (0..127).

Each message type has a given number of data bytes, the exception being the System Exclusive message which has a start and a stop byte and any number of data bytes in-between these two:

F0 ... F7

Messages can be divided into four groups:

  • Channel messages. These are used to turn notes on and off, to change patches, and change controllers (pitch bend, modulation wheel, pedal and many others). There are 16 channels, and the channel number is encoded in the lower 4 bits of the status byte. Each synth can choose which channel (or channels) it responds to. This can typically be configured.
  • System common messages.
  • System real time messages, the include start, stop, continue, song position (for playback of songs) and reset.
  • System Exclusive messages (often called Sysex messages). These are used for sending and receiving device specific such as patch data.

Some Examples of Messages

# Turn on middle C on channel 2:
92 3C 64

# Turn it back off:
82 3C 64

# Change to program (sound) number 4 on channel 2:
C2 04

# Continue (Starts a song that has been paused):
FB

# Sysex data request for the Roland SH-201 synthesizer:
F0 41 10 00 00 16 11 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 21 3F F7