Technical Specifications
MIDI messages are made up of 8-bit words, and are transmitted serially at a rate of 31.25 kbaud. This nonstandard transmission rate was chosen because it is an exact division of 1 MHz, the speed at which many early microprocessors operated. The first bit of each word identifies whether the word is a status byte or a data byte, and is followed by seven bits of information. A start bit and a stop bit are added to each byte, so a MIDI byte requires ten bits for transmission, of which only seven contain MIDI data.
A MIDI link can carry sixteen independent channels of information. Devices set to a specific channel will ignore the messages sent on all other channels. An individual device may be either monophonic or polyphonic, and can be either a monotimbral instrument that can play only one sound at a time, or a polytimbral instrument that can play multiple sounds at once. Receiving devices have an "Omni on/off" mode that determines whether they respond to all channels or only one, and a choice of "mono" or "poly" mode, which determines whether the instrument plays monophonically or polyphonically.
Read more about this topic: MIDI
Famous quotes containing the word technical:
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)