My experience with MIDI.

[Enrique]

When I bought the Yamaha electronic piano, I thought I could use the computer to enter a score into a file and then ask the computer to send it to the piano, which had a very good FM synthesizer (meaning the sound was pretty good, withing what can be expected from this kind of devices). And I had built from before, an interface for this computer with several I/O ports (not, as many people do, by looking at some computer electronics magazine, but from scratch).

All I had to do to get communications with the piano was to add a UART (a certain 40-pin chip) to my interface and the rest was programming, a thing I like very much to do. Fortunately, I had a Telequipment (a division of Tektronix) oscilloscope by that time. When I had the software and the hardware working, the first thing I did was to enter the four last movements from the piano score of Pictures at an Exhibition, beginning at Limoges, connect the piano to my hi-fi amplifier, and command the computer to launch program execution (in its playback mode). The result astonished me. It was a very rewarding job.

There already were, at that time, soft to do the job, and sound cards. But I wanted to do it myself. I have the interface and the program to this day.

[Sorrano]

That's pretty cool! I had forgotten about those UART chips. The MIDI technology was a wonderful thing back and and continues to be very helpful!

[Enrique]

Man, so you knew them! In fact, high-end modern desktop computers include an UART. Actually, today it is a subset of a larger chip. This can be fun. The YPP-50 reached, downwards, not farther than the E of the double bass. When I was getting near the last movement, La grande porta di Kiev, I realized it is written in Eb (it does not go below Eb). It was impossible to get right until the end of the preceding movement and then raise the pitch a half-tone, for all the grandiose effect of the transition would be lost. And I could not transport all I had already written because my editor was not so powerful. The solution: to raise the pitch in the middle of Baba-Yaga!

[Sorrano]

Another thing you might have done is record the low e-flat an octave high, then with the software drop it an octave. It might not have worked, though, on the keyboard. But raising the pitch of the whole was clever!