As digital systems evolve, our creative tools must do more than replicate analogue processes. MIDI has often been viewed as a basic digital networking protocol, yet its potential is far greater. In the context of remote collaboration, education, gaming, and immersive environments, MIDI reveals itself not only as a control language, but as a flexible medium for plural representation. It serves as a language, a layer, and a lens through which artistic intention and interactive feedback can coalesce across distance.
MIDI as a Language of Translation
From its conception, MIDI was built to encode musical gestures numerically, and over the course of four decades it has also proven to be a core platform to coordinate audio/visual sync during live performances. But within telematic performance systems, this encoding becomes a powerful cross- domain translator. Where MIDI values drive musical actions, audio effects control, software behaviour, visual media, gaming avatars, biometric feedback loops, or immersive spatial environments; all from a single source of musical intent. As Tanaka argued, the internet demands new modes of musical engagement, and MIDI is a natively digital actor within that paradigm. When sound is decoupled from acoustic vibration and reborn as data, the ‘instrument’ becomes a node, capable of both transmitting and receiving expressive information across platforms.
Roy Ascott’s thinking on telematic art helps frame this: networked interaction is not merely transmission, but transformation. MIDI, in this context, is not just a signal, but a stimulus, a trigger for multisensory outcomes. When musicians use a MIDI controller to influence lighting, projection, or even physiological sensors, they collapse the gap between music and interface. As digital systems allow plural outputs, MIDI becomes the bridge, not just across locations, but across media.
Layered Data for Immersive Performance
Rather than privileging audio as the primary output, Telemidi sessions proved that MIDI can operate as a flexible substrate. Each participant’s gestures are encoded and shared in real-time, enabling both sonic and non-sonic renderings. These include visualisations of performance, rhythmic animations, and even DAW-based representations of a remote collaborators’ activity. This modality reframes MIDI as a multi-channel layer, distinct from audio, yet just as expressive.
The dissertation behind Telemidi’s telematic experiments highlighted how MIDI can deliver layered intent. In contrast to waveform data, a single-purpose data mode, MIDI provides editable, interpretable, and endlessly mappable events. This lends itself to agile remote improvisation, where collaborators may visualise, trigger, or morph each other’s gestures rather than merely ‘play along’ in a traditional musical format. Music created with MIDI transcends the state of a simple file to be sent, to become an event to be shared, a dynamic flow of real-time actions rendered locally across a plural range of forms.
A Lens for Human–Computer Co-Creation
This framing of MIDI also changes how we view collaboration. Rather than striving for acoustic fidelity tethered to a centralised master clock or audio stream, the system prioritises responsiveness and mutual awareness. MIDI gestures form the basis for interaction, allowing users to interpret, transform, or respond through their own interfaces. The result is a decentralised co-creative environment, a medium for distributed presence as opposed to a simulation of proximity.
In music education, gaming, or wellness platforms, this design opens new doors. A single MIDI value might animate a character, change a harmony, or visualise a breath cycle. The same interaction can manifest across platforms, tailored specifically to context. MIDI becomes a lens through which human intent is interpreted by digital systems, allowing feedback loops that are responsive, immediate, and cross-modal.
Conclusion
By expanding the role of MIDI beyond sound generation, we discover its power as a pluralistic medium for networked creativity. In Telemidi and similar systems, MIDI serves as a bridge between minds, systems, and experiences, encoding not just notes, but nuanced human intentionality. The future of music-tech may not lie in higher fidelity, but in broader translation, where one signal carries many meanings, and creative agency is distributed, not confined.
