(Both are still awesome synths by the way, check out the video below for a glimpse at the Prophet). The idea of this musical ‘standard’ was proposed at the Audio Engineering show in November 1981.Įventually, this lead to Robert Moog announcing MIDI in October 1982 and it was demonstrated for the first time in 1983 with signals being transmitted between a Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 and a Roland JP-6. After all, you don’t want to be limited to just one companies products (he says typing this on an Apple laptop).Ī meeting between Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, Oberheim Electronics founder Tom Oberheim and Sequential Circuits president Dave Smith in the early 1980s started the discussion with representatives from Yamaha, Korg and Kawai that a universal language should be created so that various instruments could communicate with one another. This function was quite essential when creating music with more than one instrument. Trying to get two instruments to communicate was a little like getting an English and a Japanese speaker in a room and asking them to converse when neither knows any of the other person’s native language. As there was no standardized means of synchronizing electronic musical instruments from different companies together.
MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.