Instead of engineers worrying about inspection tolerances and yield, people were arguing about tone, rhythm, and sound. Everywhere musicians were experimenting with electronic instruments that were beginning to reshape how music could be created.
That evening I crashed a private party where B. B. King was sitting in the corner playing his beloved guitar, Lucille. For a while the room went quiet except for the sound of that instrument.
The next morning, wandering the convention floor again, I noticed a handwritten sign taped to a door.
Birds of a Feather — Computers and Music.
Curiosity has always been a weakness of mine, so I walked in.
Inside the room were musicians, engineers, and instrument manufacturers trying to solve a problem that had quietly emerged as electronic instruments multiplied. Every synthesizer manufacturer had invented its own way of communicating with computers. If you wanted to connect devices from different companies, you were usually out of luck.
The people in that room understood musical instruments, but very few knew much about computer networking. What they wanted was simple: a way for all those instruments to talk to each other.
Three days later I walked out as a co-sponsor of what would soon become the Musical Instrument Digital Interface protocol—MIDI.
Suddenly I had a new project and needed some new toys.
I called friends at Apple and talked them into sending me a pre-release version of their newest computer, the Macintosh. A marketing guy from Yamaha who had been in the meeting offered to ship me one of their new DX7 synthesizers.
Both arrived just as I returned home to Boston.
My wife and kids were visiting her parents in a summer rental on Cape Cod. I drove down and walked into the house carrying a small beige computer and an electronic keyboard. I set everything up for development on the kitchen table.
Over the next months I built one of the first MIDI sequencing and music editing applications for the Macintosh. The program was called Total Music. Instead of recording sound directly, it recorded musical events—what note was played, when it started, how long it lasted, and how hard the key had been struck.
Those events appeared as a musical score on the screen, where they could be edited, rearranged, and played back.
A year later my wife and I were demonstrating the system in New York at Manny’s Music and Sam Ash.