As a professional-oriented MIDI format for a short but noteworthy time, it has become the main way to distribute music on the Internet
For some reason, every year, when the beginning of November begins to loom on the horizon, I recall the composition November Rain.
I'm not a big fan of hard rock, but this is a great song, the success of which Guns N 'Roses could not be surpassed in the 27.5 years since it became the most popular on the radio. This is the longest song to hit the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100 - longer than American Pie. For many years she was the standard of popular music.
The video clip was the coolest of what was shown on MTV - and, several decades later, became one of the most popular video clips in the history of YouTube.
It lasts nine minutes. And it tells of a life-long experience - if your life is like the life of Axl Rose.
But no matter how amazing it is, it is even more amazing in the MIDI file format - it was distributed in this format on the Internet in the year 1996 - because it manages to accurately convey the spirit of the song, while taking up less than 50 Kb (depending on your sound cards).
Today we recall a too short period of time during which MIDI files have been a significant part of the Internet.
How browser wars helped popularize MIDI
In 1981, several people interested in electronic music released a scientific paper that changed the process of making music.
The work recommended a “universal synthesizer interface” for musical instruments, which would guarantee the ability to transfer musical data from one instrument to another. Initially, this technology relied on telephone jacks and was intended for synthesizers, but eventually in 1983 it turned into a digital musical instrument interface, or MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface], combining equipment interfaces and a data distribution protocol.
The MIDI format has not disappeared anywhere - and in general has become a key way for musicians to collaborate over the past 40 years. The MIDI Producers Association is approaching the release of version 2.0, a milestone for the protocol whose initial version 1.0 defined the current state of the music.
MIDI is the basis of most popular music, but in its history it has rarely passed into a state in which ordinary consumers would be interested.
However, there was a short period of time when he achieved great success with people who would not otherwise have thought to listen to synthesizer music. And the reason for this lies in its size. In fact, it's just a bunch of computer data, zeros and ones.
MIDI is small. This made it a great format for transferring music online - especially since by the mid-1990s almost any home computer that could be bought in the store had any kind of sound card.
In search of additional features, the two main developers of web browsers of that era - Microsoft and Netscape - added functionality that allowed you to use audio files when downloading sites, either as background music or as a page included files with a special player. In any case, this was one of the earliest examples of the plug-in that most encountered - even before the advent of Flash.
In particular, Microsoft Internet Explorer supported it since version 1.0, and Netscape Navigator supported it using a plug-in, and made built-in support from version 3.0. At the peak of the popularity of the Geocities site, there was a period when sites loading with MIDI files were commonplace.
When Geocities was shut down in 2009, MIDI files from various sites were compiled by a web archive team. The Internet Archive contains over 51,000 files in The Geocities MIDI Collection . The list of songs there is a time capsule dating back to a particular era. Do you have a favorite song from 1998? Look for its name there without spaces, and you will probably find it (I found in the archive at least seven different versions of November Rain).
They sound like a music capsule of the time, and evoke memories of that period among many web surfers of that time.
“Even in the era of high-quality MP3s, the simple sounds of MIDI files resonate on the web, ” Douglas Walk wrote for Spin magazine in 2000, explaining the reason for this: “They can be played on just about anything a little smarter than the pans, but they are also very small.”
However, what they did not have was constancy. When MIDI files became popular because of sound cards, the quality of the latter was very seriously different. Sound Blaster introduced a certain baseline, but MIDI files did not have a guarantee of constancy in the late 90s. It is likely that the MIDI file on the nameless sound card in a cheap Packard Bell system with used components didn’t sound as good as on the Sound Blaster AWE32, a sound card so maximal that it had its own memory expansion slots.
MIDI files sold on floppy disks - even in 2019
It is worth noting that by the time MIDI files appeared in browsers, their use as a tool for distributing content was no longer something new. In 1983, Synth-Bank, managed by Brian Bell, partnered with Santana and Herbie Hancock , was the first to implement the idea of distributing music files over a modem using such early online services as GE Link and AppleLink. It was assumed that the service will be used by professional musicians to facilitate collaboration.
“I’m trying to create worldwide access for sound engineers and end users so that they can work together without the hassle of musicians, work and travel, and mailing CDs,” Bell told Network World magazine in 1986.
There have been attempts to sell MIDI in the commercial market. Most notable was the Yamaha Disklavier piano, which used floppy disks and CDs with DRM protection to work with MIDI files. And if you didn't need the whole piano, Roland sold a device with a speaker that played MIDI files from floppy disks. However, the key audience was so narrow, and floppy disks so rare that extracting MIDI files contrary to DRM protection was a real challenge for the Hackaday magazine editor.
As you might guess, MIDI files were made and sold for the same commercial purpose as regular music — however, they were rarely studied as thoroughly as their older brother, MP3s.
It’s rather strange to think about it, but at that time we could distribute MIDI files using the pirate method, without even realizing it.
“The output of standard MIDI files is the work of the authors, subject to copyright protection, since the information contained in the file causes the sound device to produce musical notes of a certain pitch, timbre, speed and duration in a certain order, like a mechanical piano based on a roller with a melody, or CD-based CD player. "
So wrote Charlotte Douglas, chief legal adviser to the general board at the U.S. Copyright Office in 1996, deciding that MIDI files are considered copyrighted. This solution facilitated the task of licensing and sharing MIDI files with producers, although the issue of copyright was not resolved online.
MIDI musician who has made ragtime
Using these compositions based on popular songs in MIDI format, they often forget that people make them - either professionals to fill up a bank of songs (which can be useful, for example, for karaoke ), or amateurs trying to recreate songs that they like, or which they heard on the radio.
Often these are unknown people whose work is not related to the music synthesized by them in a computer format. I want to tell you a little about one of these people, because it seems to me that his life was quite interesting.
John Edward Roach, who worked as a pharmacist during the day, was a big fan of ragtime music , and for five decades he played the piano in one form or another. His fascination with Ragtime followed him into the world of modern technology when he became interested in computers.
In the 1980s, he discovered the first opportunity to combine media using the SIDPlayer tool, which allowed him to extract music from the Commodore 64 - including his favorite ragtime. At that time, he began to write music specifically for SIDPlayer, and helped to attract such interest in this format that his compositions were even sold by Softdisk, which became very famous for his participation in the careers of Doom and Quake developers.
Commodore, of course, has sunk into oblivion, but by the mid-1990s, Roach discovered MIDI - and soon the Internet discovered Roach, who built his Internet presence by creating MIDI files and distributing raptime praises. His website on AOL helped to gain popularity both Roaku and ragtime, which was forgotten when blues, jazz, country and, as a result, rock music came from him.
In a 1997 review article in The Baltimore Sun, journalist Michael Himowitz was amazed at how much he became interested in Roach's passion.
I don’t know exactly how I came across this corner of the web - before that I was not particularly interested in ragtime. However, I spent a couple of delightful hours listening to Roach's music, reading his essay and studying links to other pages with ragtime and jazz. It was a pure revelation.
Then I suddenly thought that I needed to write more about what makes the web so special - about the opportunity to do what I love. Unlike all other media that existed before, the web gives people with unusual talents and interests a chance to share their passion with similar enthusiasts - and with people like me who accidentally looked at the light.
Roach noted that his interest in ragtime was ideally suited to emphasize the possibilities of the MIDI format - in particular because it was a piano-based music style, that is, its quality remained more or less constant regardless of the quality of your sound card.
“Ragtime music is good because the piano is the piano, and most synthesizers play it well,” Roach told the newspaper. “But if you start playing with strings and bass, then what sounds good with you will not necessarily sound good with me.”
Roach’s website, which is still operating , has informative lessons on the history of this musical form, as well as Roach’s versions of classic ragtime songs written by titans from the genre such as Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton. Roach has been working on songs for months, relying on Sound Blaster AWE32 and a piano from Roland. The only minus that Roak finds in all this is that his hands are not big enough to properly play ragtime.
In a sense, Roach simply created a personal web page dedicated to the subject of his passion - along with a distribution model suitable for his work. But in the process, he went beyond this form, and although he did not reach the brand, he became an important part of the ragtime community in the late 90s, recording two albums, Syncopated Odyssey and Hot Kumquats using the MIDI format.
When he died in 1999 - prematurely - he can be said to have revolutionized ancient music by adding technology to it. His site remains online to this day, serving as a time capsule for a digital personality inspired by MIDI's creative capabilities.
For most people, accessing MIDI files to the Internet simply meant being able to listen to music while loading a web page, or download music without clogging the entire channel. For John Roach, he meant a way to create and share the subject of his passion.
Like many file formats, MIDI files were never intended to be used as they were actually used.
And its fame reflected its usefulness at a time when the request for multimedia content on the Internet was growing, and the capabilities of computers to offer it in a full-fledged format were limited (stupid modems).
A MIDI file, even taken out of context, offered a good compromise.
However, this period has already completely passed. When I downloaded web pages to study this topic, they did not play me MIDI files. Generally. And if they were supposed to play music, then often, instead of playing in a browser, MIDI files were simply downloaded to my computer.
In the end, I managed to get them to work using the Jazz-Plugin plugin , available for most popular browsers, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
In many respects, this reminds me of the development of the Internet, which left Gopher , once included by default in many browsers, but deleted from there after the protocol exited the mode.
Popular browsers are constantly doing this - and they are about to do it with FTP, which Chrome developers have been seriously discussing for more than five years.
You can also compare the history with MIDI with the history of the blink HTML tag, which just disappeared from browsers.
As I said, MIDI is not dead - not at all. Its strength is that an iPad that supports MIDI can very well communicate with the earliest MIDI-enabled devices, such as the Commodore 64.
However, there was a time when he was in the front roles, and not hiding behind the curtains. And all this thanks to the unique set of requirements of the early web.
And now I'm sorry, I'm going to come off under the MIDI version of November Rain. Or some ragtime style song. I have not decided yet.