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The term "MIDI" stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
It was originally conceived as a way of connecting electronic musical instruments
together so they can "talk" to each other - so you could play one instrument
from another. MIDI data is neither music nor sound, it is only "control" information.
It provides a way of having a "controller", such as an electronic keyboard, send out
data describing which notes were played, when, how hard they were hit, how long they were held,
if pressure ("after touch") was applied after a note was struck, if pitch bend is being
employed, if a patch change (sound change) is being called for, and so on. Another way of thinking
of it would be if you could take the keyboard off of a piano and walk across the room with it, leaving
the rest of the piano behind. All the "stuff" you would need to stretch between the
keyboard and the rest of the piano (so you could still play it) would be what gets packed into the
data in a MIDI file or into the electronic signals flowing through a MIDI cable. In a MIDI setup, this
control data is fed from a MIDI file or a MIDI keyboard into a slave MIDI sound generator such as a
synthesizer, sampled audio playback unit, or a PC sound card (in a sound card, the sounds can be
synthesized or can sometimes be sampled real sounds which are sometimes called "wave tables").
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