WEBVTT 00:00:20.239 --> 00:00:23.039 Imagine the year 1722. 00:00:23.039 --> 00:00:32.159 In a room in Köthen, lit by the yellow glow of a candle, Johann Sebastian Bach is writing music. 00:00:32.159 --> 00:00:36.399 His hand moves fast despite the shadows. 00:00:36.399 --> 00:00:39.359 A goose quill dipped in ink. 00:00:39.359 --> 00:00:43.439 A black dot resting on a hand-drawn line. 00:00:43.439 --> 00:00:46.079 He is pinning down something ethereal. 00:00:46.079 --> 00:00:52.960 He is writing down music that, at this exact moment, exists only in his head. 00:00:52.960 --> 00:00:58.159 When the page is full, he sets down the pen. 00:00:58.159 --> 00:01:10.079 Three hundred years go by, and you are sitting in an airport terminal in Chicago, or Denver, or Atlanta. 00:01:10.079 --> 00:01:14.239 Your flight has been delayed for three hours. 00:01:14.239 --> 00:01:18.640 The air feels thin and recycled. 00:01:18.640 --> 00:01:24.159 Your phone battery is at 4% and you can't find an open outlet. 00:01:24.159 --> 00:01:28.799 Near your gate, there is a public piano. 00:01:28.799 --> 00:01:41.439 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. 00:01:41.439 --> 00:01:46.079 You don't notice the stranger who sits down on the bench. 00:01:46.079 --> 00:01:49.599 You only look up when her fingers hit the keys. 00:01:49.599 --> 00:01:58.079 Notes written by candlelight fill a sterile terminal full of tired people wearing earbuds. 00:01:58.079 --> 00:02:04.640 Across three centuries, a dead man's intentions live in the hands of a complete stranger. 00:02:04.640 --> 00:02:07.040 She has never met him. 00:02:07.040 --> 00:02:12.560 She cannot speak his language, but she knows what he meant. 00:02:12.560 --> 00:02:16.240 Memorized from marks printed on a page. 00:02:16.240 --> 00:02:52.159 But 50 years ago, as musicians began shaping music out of raw electricity, that treaty fell apart. 00:02:52.159 --> 00:02:58.719 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. 00:02:58.719 --> 00:03:13.759 In the late 1970s, a black teenager named Juan Atkins is killing time in a Detroit music store. 00:03:13.759 --> 00:03:20.639 His grandmother is there too, slowly browsing through books of sheet music for her organ. 00:03:20.639 --> 00:03:24.560 Juan drifts. 00:03:24.560 --> 00:03:33.520 He wanders past the acoustic pianos into a small room in the back of the shop that is crammed with early synthesizers. 00:03:33.520 --> 00:03:36.319 He starts messing around with the dials. 00:03:36.319 --> 00:03:40.719 He is creating weird metallic sweeping frequencies. 00:03:40.719 --> 00:03:43.759 And he is completely captivated. 00:03:43.759 --> 00:03:52.960 Eventually, Juan talks his grandmother into buying him his very first synthesizer. 00:03:52.960 --> 00:03:55.439 A Korg MS-10. 00:03:55.439 --> 00:03:58.240 Picture this machine. 00:03:58.240 --> 00:04:06.159 It is a relatively small, heavy box, about a foot wide and a foot and a half long. 00:04:06.159 --> 00:04:22.959 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. 00:04:22.959 --> 00:04:28.160 To change the sound, you have to physically wire the electricity to a new path. 00:04:28.160 --> 00:04:31.519 It could only play one note at a time. 00:04:31.519 --> 00:04:37.600 But inside that limitation, Juan Atkins found an entire universe. 00:04:37.600 --> 00:04:42.959 He coaxed whole songs out of this one little box. 00:04:42.959 --> 00:04:49.199 But there was a fundamental flaw with that whole generation of electronic instruments. 00:04:49.199 --> 00:04:56.079 Broadly speaking, machines built by different manufacturers could not talk to each other. 00:04:56.079 --> 00:05:02.959 You could run a wire between a Korg and a Moog, and the electricity would cross between them perfectly. 00:05:02.959 --> 00:05:16.319 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. 00:05:16.319 --> 00:05:19.519 Or just dead silence. 00:05:19.519 --> 00:05:23.920 The problem was a lack of common language. 00:05:23.920 --> 00:05:30.800 Some companies built their gear so that adding one volt of electricity moved your sound up an octave. 00:05:30.800 --> 00:05:34.720 Others decided the voltage should double every octave. 00:05:34.720 --> 00:05:39.839 The higher you reached on the keyboard, the further the two sounds drifted apart. 00:05:39.839 --> 00:05:44.079 Same wire, same electricity. 00:05:44.079 --> 00:05:48.319 Absolutely no agreement about what any of it meant. 00:05:48.319 --> 00:05:51.120 In those days your options were bleak. 00:05:51.120 --> 00:06:03.920 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. 00:06:03.920 --> 00:06:16.959 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. 00:06:16.959 --> 00:06:26.480 Dave Smith ran a synthesizer company out of San Jose called Sequential Circuits. 00:06:26.480 --> 00:06:32.480 That meant he spent his days building the machines people were prying open with screwdrivers. 00:06:32.480 --> 00:06:37.680 He looked at the chaos and decided that these instruments should just work together. 00:06:37.680 --> 00:06:41.120 But he wasn't the only one looking for a way out of the mess. 00:06:41.120 --> 00:06:46.079 In the summer of 1981, an unexpected message crossed the Pacific. 00:06:46.079 --> 00:06:53.120 It came from Ikutaro Kakahashi, the visionary founder of a competing Japanese brand called Roland. 00:06:53.120 --> 00:07:01.600 In the cutthroat tech world of the 1980s, Kakahashi was calling for an unprecedented truce. 00:07:01.600 --> 00:07:05.839 He reached out to Smith with a radical premise. 00:07:05.839 --> 00:07:16.319 If they kept locking musicians into proprietary closed ecosystems, the entire electronic music revolution would stall. 00:07:16.319 --> 00:07:20.319 They needed a universal standard. 00:07:20.319 --> 00:07:22.800 So an alliance was born. 00:07:22.800 --> 00:07:28.399 Fueled by Kakahashi's challenge, Dave Smith went to work mapping out a baseline protocol. 00:07:28.399 --> 00:07:41.759 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. 00:07:41.759 --> 00:07:48.879 For the most part, the American industry met him with total indifference. 00:07:48.879 --> 00:07:53.199 But over in Japan, Kakahashi was waiting. 00:07:53.199 --> 00:07:58.319 He rallied engineers from Yamaha, Korg, Kauai. 00:07:58.319 --> 00:08:11.680 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. 00:08:11.680 --> 00:08:16.399 But the technical limitations of 1981 were brutal. 00:08:16.399 --> 00:08:22.480 The computing power inside a synthesizer microprocessor back then was microscopic. 00:08:22.480 --> 00:08:29.040 If you tried to send too much data down a wire, the machine's brain would choke and freeze. 00:08:29.040 --> 00:08:32.320 So they didn't try to send sound. 00:08:32.320 --> 00:08:35.840 They tried something much smaller. 00:08:35.840 --> 00:08:46.159 They shrank the entire musical universe into short, lean sentences that could travel down a cheap five-pin cable. 00:08:46.159 --> 00:08:51.679 When you pressed a key, a tiny digital sentence shot down the wire. 00:08:51.679 --> 00:08:54.879 Each sentence began with two words: Note on. 00:08:54.879 --> 00:09:01.200 That was followed by a number for the pitch. 00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:04.879 60, for instance, meant middle C. 00:09:04.879 --> 00:09:11.679 Then came a number for velocity, which was a measure of how hard your finger hit the plastic. 00:09:11.679 --> 00:09:16.240 And that number could only be one of 128 steps. 00:09:16.240 --> 00:09:20.960 A ceiling baked into how small the message had to be. 00:09:20.960 --> 00:09:30.960 The note rang out until you lifted your finger, and that's when a second message chased the first down the wire: Note off. 00:09:30.960 --> 00:09:36.639 They called it the musical instrument digital interface. 00:09:36.639 --> 00:09:38.240 MIDI. 00:09:38.240 --> 00:09:43.600 MIDI makes absolutely no sound on its own. 00:09:43.600 --> 00:09:48.559 It doesn't know what a piano is, or a guitar, or a drum. 00:09:48.559 --> 00:09:51.039 It is instructions. 00:09:51.039 --> 00:09:54.879 Sheet music written in electricity. 00:09:54.879 --> 00:10:01.840 In 1983, MIDI made its debut at a trade show floor in Anaheim, California. 00:10:01.840 --> 00:10:08.159 Dave Smith and Ikutara Kakahashi set two instruments on a cloth-covered table. 00:10:08.159 --> 00:10:13.200 Smith's Prophet 600 and a Roland Jupiter 6. 00:10:13.200 --> 00:10:18.879 These were two fierce rivals built on opposite sides of an ocean. 00:10:18.879 --> 00:10:23.279 Machines that had never understood a single word from one another. 00:10:23.279 --> 00:10:28.320 Smith plugged that cheap five-pin cable into the back of both boxes. 00:10:28.320 --> 00:10:36.720 Then he sat down at his Prophet 600, stretched out his hand, and pressed a single key. 00:10:36.720 --> 00:10:41.279 Across the table, the Roland Jupiter 6 answered. 00:10:41.279 --> 00:10:43.600 The exact same note. 00:10:43.600 --> 00:10:46.000 The exact same force. 00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:49.039 Note on. Note off. 00:10:49.039 --> 00:10:53.519 The engineers watching from the crowd didn't cheer. 00:10:53.519 --> 00:10:56.000 Some were stunned into silence. 00:10:56.000 --> 00:10:58.879 Many were deeply skeptical. 00:10:58.879 --> 00:11:07.679 But then Smith and Kakahashi did the thing that almost nobody in the history of consumer electronics had ever done. 00:11:07.679 --> 00:11:11.919 They published the entire MIDI specification in the open. 00:11:11.919 --> 00:11:15.279 For anyone, completely free. 00:11:15.279 --> 00:11:20.879 Over the next few years, MIDI exploded. 00:11:20.879 --> 00:11:28.639 And back in Detroit, by 1985, Juan Atkins had built himself a makeshift studio in his grandmother's basement. 00:11:28.639 --> 00:11:39.600 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. 00:11:39.600 --> 00:11:48.639 Two instruments made by rivals were suddenly sitting in a wood-paneled basement in Michigan, talking to each other in perfect harmony. 00:11:48.639 --> 00:11:56.960 Juan Atkins layered those synchronized machines together with more sounds and recorded a song called "No UFOs". 00:11:56.960 --> 00:12:02.639 It is widely considered to be the first true techno track. 00:12:02.639 --> 00:12:17.279 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. 00:12:17.279 --> 00:12:26.000 The sounds mutated as computers grew more powerful, but for decades the underlying language of MIDI never changed. 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:34.559 But it took 30 years for the music industry to fully recognize what Dave Smith and Ikutaro Kakahashi had given away. 00:12:34.559 --> 00:12:39.440 In 2013, the Recording Academy awarded them a technical Grammy. 00:12:39.440 --> 00:12:42.960 Kakahashi was in his 80s by then. 00:12:42.960 --> 00:12:49.120 His son stood on the stage and accepted the tiny golden gramophone on his behalf. 00:12:49.120 --> 00:12:56.559 For nearly 40 years, that original treaty held the digital music world together. 00:12:56.559 --> 00:13:01.440 It wasn't until around 2020 that the new version of MIDI arrived. 00:13:01.440 --> 00:13:07.039 You were no longer locked into one of 128 possible velocity measures. 00:13:07.039 --> 00:13:10.480 And the messages could now move bidirectionally. 00:13:10.480 --> 00:13:14.399 And it is completely backward compatible. 00:13:14.399 --> 00:13:21.120 The new MIDI still understands every word the old MIDI ever spoke. 00:13:21.120 --> 00:13:29.919 Somewhere, right now, there is a young girl sitting at a keyboard. 00:13:29.919 --> 00:13:38.320 Not a grand piano, a $120 plastic keyboard with a black power cord running to a wall outlet. 00:13:38.320 --> 00:13:43.200 She is learning her very first classical piece. 00:13:43.200 --> 00:13:46.240 It is almost always this one. 00:13:46.240 --> 00:13:49.039 Because it's all in the same key. 00:13:49.039 --> 00:13:51.759 And the pattern repeats over and over. 00:13:51.759 --> 00:13:56.320 But she is 10 years old and she is getting bored. 00:13:56.320 --> 00:14:01.039 She has already been practicing for 15 whole minutes. 00:14:01.039 --> 00:14:07.759 So she stops playing and reaches her hand up to a small rubber button on the console. 00:14:07.759 --> 00:14:10.399 She presses it. 00:14:10.399 --> 00:14:16.159 She plays the keys again, and this time the notes come out sounding like a heavy pipe organ. 00:14:16.159 --> 00:14:21.600 She presses the button again, and now it's a barque harpsichord. 00:14:21.600 --> 00:14:28.240 One more press, and the notes sound like they're coming from a spaceship or something. 00:14:28.240 --> 00:14:33.360 No strings are vibrating inside that plastic box. 00:14:33.360 --> 00:14:36.879 No air is moving through a pipe. 00:14:36.879 --> 00:14:45.440 The keys are sending numbers down a wire, and a tiny silicon chip is translating them perfectly into sound. 00:14:45.440 --> 00:14:56.320 She doesn't know that when Bach was writing those notes by candlelight, that he was actually thinking of an organ or a harpsichord. 00:14:56.320 --> 00:15:03.519 She doesn't know that the piano, as she knows it, didn't exist yet. 00:15:03.519 --> 00:15:15.120 And the man who wrote those notes had absolutely no idea that an instrument like hers could ever exist in the physical world. 00:15:15.120 --> 00:15:19.919 But the notes land precisely where he put them. 00:15:19.919 --> 00:15:23.600 Note on. Note off. 00:15:23.600 --> 00:15:31.120 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. 00:15:31.120 --> 00:15:40.000 If you enjoyed this story, please rate and review this show wherever you listen. 00:15:40.000 --> 00:15:47.279 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.