Speaker: Imagine the year 1722.
In a room in Köthen, lit by the yellow glow of a candle, Johann
Sebastian Bach is writing music.
His hand moves fast despite the shadows.
A goose quill dipped in ink.
A black dot resting on a hand-drawn line.
He is pinning down something ethereal.
He is writing down music that, at this exact moment, exists
only in his head.
When the page is full, he sets down the pen.
Three hundred years go by, and you are sitting in an airport
terminal in Chicago, or Denver, or Atlanta.
Your flight has been delayed for three hours.
The air feels thin and recycled.
Your phone battery is at 4% and you can't find an open outlet.
Near your gate, there is a public piano.
It is scuffed, missing a piece of veneer on the side with the
words PLAY ME printed in chipped block letters across the music
rack.
You don't notice the stranger who sits down on the bench.
You only look up when her fingers hit the keys.
Notes written by candlelight fill a sterile terminal full of
tired people wearing earbuds.
Across three centuries, a dead man's intentions live in the
hands of a complete stranger.
She has never met him.
She cannot speak his language, but she knows what he meant.
Memorized from marks printed on a page.
But 50 years ago, as musicians began shaping music out of raw
electricity, that treaty fell apart.
I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
In the late 1970s, a black teenager named Juan Atkins is
killing time in a Detroit music store.
His grandmother is there too, slowly browsing through books of
sheet music for her organ.
Juan drifts.
He wanders past the acoustic pianos into a small room in the
back of the shop that is crammed with early synthesizers.
He starts messing around with the dials.
He is creating weird metallic sweeping frequencies.
And he is completely captivated.
Eventually, Juan talks his grandmother into buying him his
very first synthesizer.
A Korg MS-10.
Picture this machine.
It is a relatively small, heavy box, about a foot wide and a
foot and a half long.
It has a short, toy-like keyboard, a vertical bank of
knobs, and on the right side a patch panel. A grid of tiny
holes where you run short, colorful cables from one jack to
another.
To change the sound, you have to physically wire the
electricity to a new path.
It could only play one note at a time.
But inside that limitation, Juan Atkins found an entire
universe.
He coaxed whole songs out of this one little box.
But there was a fundamental flaw with that whole generation
of electronic instruments.
Broadly speaking, machines built by different manufacturers
could not talk to each other.
You could run a wire between a Korg and a Moog, and the
electricity would cross between them perfectly.
One machine would send a signal down the wire: "Play middle C!"
But the machine on the other end would take that voltage and
answer with a horrific shriek.
Or just dead silence.
The problem was a lack of common language.
Some companies built their gear so that adding one volt of
electricity moved your sound up an octave.
Others decided the voltage should double every octave.
The higher you reached on the keyboard, the further the two
sounds drifted apart.
Same wire, same electricity.
Absolutely no agreement about what any of it meant.
In those days your options were bleak.
You either stuck exclusively to one expensive brand, or you
took a screwdriver, pried the plastic cases off your
equipment, pulled out a soldering iron, and tried to
force the machines to collaborate.
Juan Atkins started making music under these constraints,
with no way of knowing that two strangers on opposite sides of
the planet were already working on a fix.
Dave Smith ran a synthesizer company out of San Jose called
Sequential Circuits.
That meant he spent his days building the machines people
were prying open with screwdrivers.
He looked at the chaos and decided that these instruments
should just work together.
But he wasn't the only one looking for a way out of the
mess.
In the summer of 1981, an unexpected message crossed the
Pacific.
It came from Ikutaro Kakahashi, the visionary founder of a
competing Japanese brand called Roland.
In the cutthroat tech world of the 1980s, Kakahashi was calling
for an unprecedented truce.
He reached out to Smith with a radical premise.
If they kept locking musicians into proprietary closed
ecosystems, the entire electronic music revolution
would stall.
They needed a universal standard.
So an alliance was born.
Fueled by Kakahashi's challenge, Dave Smith went to
work mapping out a baseline protocol.
By November of 1981, Smith was standing on a stage at an audio
convention in New York City, presenting a technical paper for
a prototype he called the Universal Synthesizer Interface.
For the most part, the American industry met him with total
indifference.
But over in Japan, Kakahashi was waiting.
He rallied engineers from Yamaha, Korg, Kauai.
The goal was this: create a digital language so simple and
so incredibly cheap to implement that no manufacturer on Earth
could afford to refuse it.
But the technical limitations of 1981 were brutal.
The computing power inside a synthesizer microprocessor back
then was microscopic.
If you tried to send too much data down a wire, the machine's
brain would choke and freeze.
So they didn't try to send sound.
They tried something much smaller.
They shrank the entire musical universe into short, lean
sentences that could travel down a cheap five-pin cable.
When you pressed a key, a tiny digital sentence shot down the
wire.
Each sentence began with two words: Note on.
That was followed by a number for the pitch.
60, for instance, meant middle C.
Then came a number for velocity, which was a measure of
how hard your finger hit the plastic.
And that number could only be one of 128 steps.
A ceiling baked into how small the message had to be.
The note rang out until you lifted your finger, and that's
when a second message chased the first down the wire: Note off.
They called it the musical instrument digital interface.
MIDI.
MIDI makes absolutely no sound on its own.
It doesn't know what a piano is, or a guitar, or a drum.
It is instructions.
Sheet music written in electricity.
In 1983, MIDI made its debut at a trade show floor in Anaheim,
California.
Dave Smith and Ikutara Kakahashi set two instruments on
a cloth-covered table.
Smith's Prophet 600 and a Roland Jupiter 6.
These were two fierce rivals built on opposite sides of an
ocean.
Machines that had never understood a single word from
one another.
Smith plugged that cheap five-pin cable into the back of
both boxes.
Then he sat down at his Prophet 600, stretched out his hand,
and pressed a single key.
Across the table, the Roland Jupiter 6 answered.
The exact same note.
The exact same force.
Note on. Note off.
The engineers watching from the crowd didn't cheer.
Some were stunned into silence.
Many were deeply skeptical.
But then Smith and Kakahashi did the thing that almost nobody
in the history of consumer electronics had ever done.
They published the entire MIDI specification in the open.
For anyone, completely free.
Over the next few years, MIDI exploded.
And back in Detroit, by 1985, Juan Atkins had built himself a
makeshift studio in his grandmother's basement.
He chained two drum machines straight to each other, a MIDI
cable out of his Sequential Circuits drum tracks, and into
his Roland TR-909.
Two instruments made by rivals were suddenly sitting in a
wood-paneled basement in Michigan, talking to each other
in perfect harmony.
Juan Atkins layered those synchronized machines together
with more sounds and recorded a song called "No UFOs".
It is widely considered to be the first true techno track.
Techno left that Detroit basement and swept across the
globe, filling warehouses in Chicago, clubs in New York, and
massive open-air raves across Europe.
The sounds mutated as computers grew more powerful, but for
decades the underlying language of MIDI never changed.
But it took 30 years for the music industry to fully
recognize what Dave Smith and Ikutaro Kakahashi had given
away.
In 2013, the Recording Academy awarded them a technical Grammy.
Kakahashi was in his 80s by then.
His son stood on the stage and accepted the tiny golden
gramophone on his behalf.
For nearly 40 years, that original treaty held the digital
music world together.
It wasn't until around 2020 that the new version of MIDI
arrived.
You were no longer locked into one of 128 possible velocity
measures.
And the messages could now move bidirectionally.
And it is completely backward compatible.
The new MIDI still understands every word the old MIDI ever
spoke.
Somewhere, right now, there is a young girl sitting at a
keyboard.
Not a grand piano, a $120 plastic keyboard with a black
power cord running to a wall outlet.
She is learning her very first classical piece.
It is almost always this one.
Because it's all in the same key.
And the pattern repeats over and over.
But she is 10 years old and she is getting bored.
She has already been practicing for 15 whole minutes.
So she stops playing and reaches her hand up to a small
rubber button on the console.
She presses it.
She plays the keys again, and this time the notes come out
sounding like a heavy pipe organ.
She presses the button again, and now it's a barque
harpsichord.
One more press, and the notes sound like they're coming from a
spaceship or something.
No strings are vibrating inside that plastic box.
No air is moving through a pipe.
The keys are sending numbers down a wire, and a tiny silicon
chip is translating them perfectly into sound.
She doesn't know that when Bach was writing those notes by
candlelight, that he was actually thinking of an organ or
a harpsichord.
She doesn't know that the piano, as she knows it, didn't
exist yet.
And the man who wrote those notes had absolutely no idea
that an instrument like hers could ever exist in the physical
world.
But the notes land precisely where he put them.
Note on. Note off.
I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
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notes.foundinthemachine.com. Thanks for listening.