Equipment

Synthesizers : MIDI control & computers

Synthesizers became more usable with the invention in 1983 of MIDI, a standardized digital control interface, and later with the creation of all-digital synthesizers and samplers. MIDI interfaces are now almost ubiquitous on music equipment, as well as personal computers.

The so-called General MIDI (GM) standard was devised in the late 1980s to serve as a consistent way of describing the set of synthesized tonalities available to a PC for playback of musical scores. For the first time, a given MIDI preset would consistently produce an oboe or guitar sound (etc.) on any GM-conforming device. The file format .mid was also established and became a popular standard for exchange of music scores between computers.

3345, the Vinyl Records Home.