MIDI Mystery Cache

The Cache

This is a two stage multicache in Lexington's Meagherville conservation land. I suggest starting at one of the trailheads listed as Additional Waypoints, at the end of Cedar St. or Garfield St. There is also a trailhead at the end of Ward St., but when I placed the cache (in July) it was overgrown with thorn bushes, so I would not recommend going that way (at least not in summer).

The Puzzle

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. In the early 1980’s, the MIDI specification was created by a group of synthesizer manufacturers, to provide a standard way for synthesizers and keyboards made by different companies to be connected and used together. While it was very successful in that goal, it also ended up being used in other ways. MIDI allowed synthesizers to be controlled not just by other synthesizers or keyboards, but also by computers. Thus MIDI led to the creation of software applications for recording and editing musical performances, known as sequencers. Early sequencers such as Performer, Vision, Cubase, and Cakewalk allowed composers to work on multi-instrument compositions and hear them without needing other musicians to play the instruments. The first versions of these programs were very primitive, only allowing MIDI data to be viewed as a textual list of events, but over time they were augmented to allow music to be viewed and edited either with traditional music notation, or as a graphical “piano-roll” view. Eventually, as computers became more powerful, many sequencer applications were expanded to allow digital audio to be recorded and edited together with MIDI, and grew into full-featured Digital Audio Workstations, or DAWs.

While it was MIDI which allowed a composer or musician to use a wide variety of different synthesizers with a sequencer or DAW, it did not solve the problem of allowing people using different applications to collaborate. Typically, each sequencer has its own file format, which is not compatible with other applications. A related standard, the Standard MIDI File, solves this problem. A Standard MIDI File (SMF) simply encodes a sequence of MIDI events, with information about the relative timing of those events. Most sequencers or DAWs are able to import and export SMFs, allowing a composition created in one DAW such as Digital Performer to be opened in another DAW, such as Logic or GarageBand. Nowadays, SMFs can be played back by most web browsers, as well as applications like QuickTime Player and Windows Media Player. And they find use for many other purposes, such as ringtones for mobile phones, karaoke machines, and of course the widely despised background music on cheesy web pages.

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