Sound was trapped inside individual machines for twenty years. Then a single wire changed everything.
Robert Moog demonstrates voltage-controlled synthesis. Sound becomes programmable for the first time — but every machine still speaks its own private language.
Home computers begin shipping with dedicated sound chips. Three voices. Hard limits. Composers learn to fight the hardware and call it music.
The first microprocessor-based music sequencer ships. Machines can now remember a performance — but they still cannot talk to each other.
Rhythm separates from the human body. The Roland TR-808 ships. Synthesized percussion becomes a genre-defining sound — born from a machine that was considered a failure.
Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits stands on a stage and proposes a universal standard for musical instruments to communicate. The industry is skeptical. Then it listens.
The MIDI specification is published. January. One wire. One language. Any instrument can now send instructions to any other instrument — regardless of manufacturer, regardless of decade.
The Atari 520 ST ships with MIDI ports built in as standard. A $799 home computer becomes a professional studio tool overnight. Cubase and Notator follow within two years.
The home studio is no longer a fantasy. The same software used in commercial recording studios runs in spare bedrooms. Sound is no longer owned by whoever can afford the room.
The MIDI 1.0 standard has not changed in over forty years. Every piece of music made with digital instruments in that time traces a direct line back to a single specification published in 1983.
You've worked with the C64 model — three channels, chip synthesis, hard limits. Here's what that looked like:
All of that was real. Those were not artificial limits added for the lesson. That was the hardware.