Hardware

After some settlement period in which MIDI was still wanting to lure more adepts, the interface started to be used in many different applications beyond the music realm. Music concerts of many rock groups give the creative people a new way to combine the musical performances with the show itself.

Being a concert an audio visual show, lights have a predominant role to help induce some kind of mood in the listeners. If this is true and we want to synchronize (hold this word in your mind) lights with music, then - some wise guy might think- why not use midi to mark crutial events in the performance and have a more complete and fulfilling show?

Voila! There you have it. The idea was realized and now MIDI is used widely in almost any light set and respected concert hall to run "light sequences" altogether with the show. The analogy is quite direct: instead of turning off or on a note you turn off or on a light. How intense or how dimmed is just a matter of duration and velocity (volume). Light colors are matched to key notes and movement is related to control changes or note (bulb) sequences. Even musical scales can have its corresponding analogy. That’s why it was no dificult for the industry to adopt this interface as the one to control all the paraphernalia a concert show demands.

Another realm seducted by the beauty of this interface is the house automatión business -A natural consequence of the one explained before- Now many household appliances have a MIDi interface embedded in some form of another. Toasters, blenders, coffee heaters, refrigerators, and (of course) light bulb sockets. You name it. All the house electrical wiring installation is the medium to convey all the midi data to the designated appliance. You can say if every room is a “channel” and turn on and off any appliance (key note) in that room. If you run short of channels (what a big house you have!!) there is always a way to assemble a second midi port.

So as a corollary:

Any electronic or electrical device which can be turned off or on (which one is not? :-) ), have varying degrees of operation from quiet to loud or slow to fast or soft to hard is a candidate to be handled by MIDI.