Music Glossary

MIDI

A protocol that sends performance data (notes, timing) rather than audio itself.

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a decades-old standard that lets instruments and computers communicate performance information — which note was played, how hard, when it started and stopped — rather than recorded sound. When you play a MIDI keyboard into a DAW, you are not recording audio; you are recording instructions that can later trigger any virtual instrument, and that you can freely edit, quantise, transpose or re-voice after the fact. This separation of performance from sound is one of the most powerful ideas in modern production, because it makes a recorded part endlessly malleable.

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