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