Center for New Music and Audio Technologies

Introduction

The evolution of musical tradition has resulted in advanced skills of playing acoustical instruments. Musicians created virtuotic capabilities to communicate through instruments by means of gestures of mouth, hands, and feet. It may be asserted, however, that even a beautiful and cleverly designed instrument is constrained by inescapable mechanical limits. The advent of the digital computer helped to widen those limits and opened new ways in creating music. Obviously, the computers interface, like alphanumerical keyboard or mouse, is not very suitable for capturing musical gestures. Hence, dozens of input devices have been designed to gather these gestures and make them available in the digital computer. One of the most successful methods of conveying musical performance information as electronic data is provided by the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Computer) protocol. Originally developed to allow musicians to connect synthesizers together, MIDI decidedly influenced the computer music performance practice through its establishment and widespread commercial availability.

The Digital Media Internetworking project should support the MIDI protocol in order to provide compatibility with commonly used musical instruments and controllers. The following sections describe the design of a complete MIDI interface for an FPGA as required for gathering musical gestures and making them accessible for further processing.

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