1. Teach yourself about the MIDI software protocol by reading as many as possible of the following articles. Start with this essay on MIDI that I wrote for another class. Then proceed to this page of Tutorials on MIDI provided by the MIDI Manufacturers Association. It contains a readable and not-too-technical Introduction to MIDI, as well as a 4-part explanation of the technical aspects of the Technology of MIDI. The article on MIDI and Music Synthesis by Jim Heckroth is pretty dry and technical, and mostly gives the same sort of information about the MIDI protocol, but toward the end of the article it contains some useful information about how sampling synthesis works.

2. In Max, use pitch and velocity information to control the frequency and amplitude of a simple software synthesizer you design. If you have access to a MIDI keyboard, either in the Arts Media Center or elsewhere on your own, use the MIDI object notein to get the vital information of the MIDI note data coming from the keyboard. If you don’t have access to a MIDI instrument, you can simulate note-on pitch and velocity information from a keyboard using the Max kslider object, and you can turn notes off with the makenote object or the flush object. Most commercial synthesizers are polyphonic—able to play multiple notes simultaneously—but for this exercise you only need to make a monophonic synthesizer capable of playing a single note at a time. The method of tone generation is up to you; you can use additive synthesis, or frequency modulation (FM) synthesis, or any other technique you want to try. Once you have figured out the basic mechanics of how to play notes on your synthesizer, spend some time trying to make it actually sound good. (Analyze what characteristic would make it sound better than it does, and see if you can figure out how to implement that characteristic.) Place your completed Max patch in the EEE DropBox called “SimpleSynth1”.