MIDI

Musical Instrument Digital Interface is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music. A single MIDI cable can carry up to sixteen channels of MIDI data, each of which can be routed to a separate device. Each interaction with a key, button, knob or slider is converted into a MIDI event, which specifies musical instructions, such as a note's pitch, timing and velocity.

One common MIDI application is to play a MIDI keyboard or other controller and use it to trigger a digital sound module to generate sounds, which the audience hears produced by a keyboard amplifier.
MIDI data can be transferred via MIDI or USB cable, or recorded to a sequencer or digital audio workstation for editing or playback.

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