MIDI is an Acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a protocol which alows electronic musical instruments to communicate with each other.

The MIDI files on the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive are really only sets of instructions created by a synthesiser on one computer which tell the synthesiser on your computer what to do. They include information such as when to start and stop playing a particular note, how loud (or soft) to play it and which instrument sound your synthesiser should use to reproduce it. They are not recordings and the sound you hear will depend on the quality of the sounds stored in your synthesiser. The same MIDI file can sound very different on different computers!

To see if you are hearing the music as we intended try the following test. First, play this MIDI file and then play this recording of the same snatch of music.

If they sound the same, then you are hearing our MIDI files as we intended.

If the second sounded better than the first, you might consider having a better sound card fitted to your computer.

If the first sounded better, you have a much better sound card in your computer than I have in mine!

Happy listening!

Page modified 23 December 2012