Information about MIDI for School Music Teachers

MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and is a protocol that allows MIDI devices and computers to communicate with each other. It was developed in early 1980s and has been adopted universally by all digital musical manufacturers. MIDI does not produce any sound by itself. It sends digital information such as a note - pitch, velocity (how hard it was pressed) and its length - to a MIDI device and it generates the sound. This means that music software can record the MIDI data in the computer and play this back to MIDI devices and edit the MIDI data as well. Even though MIDI was univerally adopted, each digital keyboard manufacturer placed their musical instrument sounds in different orders, so if you substituted one MIDI device for another, the instruments may be entirely different to those played on the first MIDI device. To overcome this issue, the MIDI association came up with a new standard called General MIDI where each digital keyboard used the same set of 128 sounds and placed each sound in the same place so that substituting one General MIDI device for another would still play the same sound e.g. a piano is still a piano and a trumpet is still a trumpet. If you are using MIDI keyboards at a school, you should purchase General MIDI keyboards to ensure compatibility when used with music software. The sounds they have been grouped into 16 groups of 8 sounds and the following tables show the groupings and the 128 General MIDI set of sounds.