Been reading this book I chanced upon.

from the forward:
"In this engaging cultural history of MIDI, Ryan Diduck contributes to the growing and lively body of research on music technologies. In so doing he extends the rich and important Canadian tradition of critical intellectual reflection on the history of media. But what kind of history of media technologies do we need and want? Today, many media theorists, in their attempts to hone the object of study, produce histories of media that are more and more pure and monothematic in their epistemic focus — and in this sense excessively homogeneous. Effectively, such theorists throw down the gauntlet to the rest of us, declaring: “Match us in our intense purity of focus!” Diduck adroitly resists the challenge of Theory. If Friedrich Kittler is cited, so too is Genesis P. Orridge — and here is the break. For Diduck’s history of technology is of a different, heterogeneous kind, one that keeps working outwards."

He explains not just MIDI, but the evolution of the piano style keyboard, its various sizes and octaves, and all the mechanical variants, but so to synthesizers etc. He had access to the NAMM archives and tells a good story.

if you want to understand your gear, or why your gear is the way it is, this is a good read. Its not as dry as the forword makes it sound, if anything its the opposite, engaging, understandable, and interesting.

two quotes he opens with:

“MIDI. Abbreviation for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a communications protocol that allows a central electronic device, usually a keyboard or a computer, to interact with other MIDI-compatible devices, enabling one person to command several instruments at once — and to tweak, twiddle, and layer every last note and beat of a composition to one’s heart’s content. MIDI, which was developed by a consortium of musical-instrument manufacturers (among them Yamaha, Roland, and Korg), was viewed warily by many purists when it was introduced in 1983, but is now used by nearly all Rock musicians save the White Stripes. With all my MIDI sequencers and interfaces, I can perform The Wall without David, Rick, or Nick, God help them.” — The Rock Snob’s Dictionary1

“Technical media don’t arise out of human needs, as their current interpretation in terms of bodily prostheses has it, they follow each other in a rhythm of escalating strategic answers.”

— Friedrich Kittler2

available at better internet stores and the usual tawdry corners of the web.

https://www.amazon.com/Mad-Skills-T...se&keywords=Ryan+Diduck&qid=1720105389&sr=8-1

Library Genesis has it on sale this decade only...