MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is a technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music. MIDI was invented in the early 1980s to standardize the growing amount of digital music hardware. MIDI messages are the digital data transmissions that tell music gear what to do. MIDI allows digital music gear to speak the same language, and it makes it possible to record music in a form that allows for easy note editing, flexible orchestration, and song arrangement. MIDI data can be transferred via MIDI or USB cable, or recorded to a sequencer or digital audio workstation to be edited or played back. MIDI is used to play a MIDI keyboard or other controller and use it to trigger a digital sound module to generate sounds, which the audience hears produced by a keyboard amplifier. MIDI recordings can be manipulated in ways that audio recordings cannot, such as changing the key, instrumentation, or tempo of a MIDI arrangement, and to reorder its individual sections, or even edit individual notes. MIDI can also be used during live performances to trigger hardware devices like rackmount synths or sampled percussion pads, and DMX lighting hardware often uses MIDI as a communication protocol since it’s common in installed audio systems for theaters and music venues.