I was going to go to bed without writing anything tonight (now early A.M. tomorrow morning). That was until I stumbled across an old MIDI file from 1996, one of my very first attempts at musical composition, a very short 12-measure piece.

What is MIDI? It stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is basically a standard way electronic compononents and various instruments can communicate electronically. A MIDI file is usually a file that contains a "recording" of music, but not like an MP3 or WAV file. Instead of containing the actual digitized sound (like is stored on audio CDs), a MIDI file just records which notes were played, for how long, and when. It's a little bit like sheet music for computers. So if you have a good computer sound card that supports MIDI, or if you have an installed MIDI software synthesizer, you can play a MIDI file.

Back when I first got a computer of my own, in 1996, I shortly thereafter experiemented with some MIDI editing software that allowed me to enter notes into the computer by hand, and then would play them back to me. I had a blast! I think I went a little crazy.

I then learned that some web browsers (web browsers back then were a tad more clunky than today) had the ability to play a MIDI file as background music for a web page. I whipped up a short twelve-bar MIDI file and put it online to see what would happen. Sure enough, it played in my web browser (Netscape was the biggest web browser back then). Because it would repeate when it finished, I wrote the short 12-bar bit to fit together, the end not really an ending at all, leading right back to the beginning.

Anyway, I was looking through my web files, and there it was. So I played it. And it didn't sound so bad, a fun catchy little tune. Fortunately for my web site visitors, I do not subject them to it playing automatically in the background. While it was a novel concept, repeating 12-bars over-and-over again gets old very quickly!

I called it the "InfoWest Blues", named after the place where I worked then (and still work today). Even though it isn't a real full-length song by any means (12 bars just isn't enough in many cases, nor in this case), it holds a fond spot in my memory.

If your web browser supports it, click here to see, er, no, I mean hear it. Of course if you don't have sound enabled on your computer, or if your web browser doesn't know how to handle a MIDI file, you're out of luck (or very lucky, depending on your point of view).

I did another musical fragment, a bit longer, this one darker in tone, for another web page. When MIDI files play back, the sounds of the instruments you hear may be totally different than those on someone else's computer. When I wrote this other fragment, I chose General MIDI instrumentation that sounded okay on my 1996 Soundblaster AWE32 sound card. Unfortunately, since that computer is long gone, no other computer I've ever played it on sounds as good, and some sound absolutely awful. All because different computers' General MIDI instrument sets differ so much. Still, if you're game, check it out here. Perhaps your computer's General MIDI instrument set will work.

Or not. I just tried it out on my notebook computer, and my browser, Mozilla, used Quicktime to play the file. It sounded hideous, nothing like it should. I even tried right-clicking on the link and saving the MIDI file to my Windows desktop. Even the Windows software synth. on this computer didn't make it sound right (though it wasn't nearly as bad as the Quicktime synth).

Now remember, these minicompositions aren't full songs. They're really just musical loops, designed for seamless repetition. And I'm an amateur when it comes to this. Don't forget (especially in regard to the second one), that instrumentation makes a big difference, and each MIDI playback system on a computer will likely have instruments that sound considerably different than on the system the MIDI file was originally composed on. Lastly, these were composed one note at a time on a computer screen using software and the mouse to point and click. So there is zero musical expression in the playback, just computer-perfect robotically played notes. MIDI does support a degree of expression, but there's virtually none in these files.

Holy cow! This post was supposed to be short. Oh, well...