Sunday, September 15, 2013

MIDI

MIDI basically seems like a musical language. It's a program or executable that can be read by certain software equipped to read it. The frequencies and pitches correlate to notes, and the notes, obviously, form into a melody or song. The original MIDI files themselves were actually quite small, making them ideal for early generation video games and computer software.

Weirdly enough, the MIDI style, which was originally intended as a composition format, actually became popularized due to the association with old-school video games. Things like chip tunes and 8 bit music evolved from the original compositions. They feature a focus on melody and lighter background instrumentation. Actually, there's a bit of a "genre" revolving around creating music using a Gameboy. 

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