MIDI readings

MIDI is basically a digital piece of software that is useful because it can recreate sounds inputted by the user using a piano keyboard with digital output. It can also recreate sounds inputted by computer keyboard. The sounds that MIDI creates are the same in any application because MIDI is a standardized system. A useful analogy is the player piano. The player piano "reads" the pinpricks on a piano roll and corresponds the correct note with the configuration of the holes on the piano roll. Similarly, a MIDI device "reads" the inputted pitch and timbre and plays a corresponding sound.

This is really useful when there are a lot of sound files to store; the memory taken by the MIDI file is only about 1/10th of memory taken by a digital file. Transposing is also no problem for the MIDI. If one uses MIDI to transpose a song from the key of A to the key of Bb, for example, MIDI transposes the pitches correspondingly. This has no impact on the quality of the sounds, as they are the same across all platforms. This is also one of MIDI's drawbacks. The quality of sound that MIDI produces is undesirable and should not be used to illustrate timbre to a beginning student, for example.

I think that MIDI makes up for this in ease of use compared to a digital audio. As technology gives us more computing power in smaller bits, I think that digital audio will be preferred over MIDI because of the nature of music education and performance. To me, there is no way, MIDI or digital, that can replace the sound of a human being playing an instrument, no matter how far technology in general progresses.