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The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is now a de facto standard for the digital representation of musical events. Actions of live musical performers are being MIDIfied, commercial software is being based on MIDI-gated conceptions, and digital synthesizers are being slaved to MIDI masters. MIDI-based hardware and software is also proliferating at a tremendous rate, virtually ensuring that the characteristics of MIDI will play an important role in shaping a significant portion of future music. This paper concentrates on known dysfunctions of MIDI from a purely musical point of view, paying particular attention to performance capture, the digital representation of musical control processes, and synthesizer control.
Frank R. Moore (1988) studied this question.