MIDI

Question 1

What does MIDI stand for?

Answer 1

• Musical Instrument Digital Interface

Question 2

What is MIDI?

Answer 2

• Communications protocol that allows electronic musical instruments to interact with each other

Question 3

What does the MIDI protocol use?

Answer 3

• 8-bit serial transmission with one start bit and one stop bit, and is therefore asynchronous

Question 4

What does a MIDI file consist of?

Answer 4

• a list of commands that instruct a device how to produce a particular sound or musical note

Question 5

What does each MIDI command have?

Answer 5

• a specific sequence of bytes

Question 6

What is the first byte and what does it do?

Answer 6

• it is the status byte and it informs the MIDI device what function to perform

Question 7

What is encoded in the status byte?

Answer 7

• the MIDI channel

Question 8

What does MIDI operate on?

Answer 8

• 16 different channels , which are numbered 0 to 15

Question 9

What are some examples of MIDI commands?

Answer 9

• note on / off - indicates that a key has been pressed/ released to produce / stop producing a musical note
• key pressure - indicates how hard the key has been pressed

Question 10

Which two additional bytes are required?

Answer 10

• a pitch byte - tells the MIDI device which note to play

- a velocity byte - tells the device how loud to play the note

Question 11

What happens when music or sound is recorded on a computer system?

Answer 11

• these MIDI messages are saved in a file which is

recognized by the file extension .mid.

Question 12

What happens if the mid. file is played back through a musical instrument?

Answer 12

• such as an electronic keyboard, the music will be played back in an identical way to the original

Question 13

How would somebody play back through an instrument?

Answer 13

• one would need the use of sequencer software, since the MIDI files wouldn’t be recognized in their ‘raw’ form

Question 14

Why are MIDI files considerably smaller than an MP3 file?

Answer 14

• they don’t contain any audio tracks