One of Polansky’s major frustrations with MIDI is that it was designed to accommodate traditional music and doesn’t do many of the things he needs to do in the experimental music he writes. “The basic problem is that any time you try to define a standard,” he says, “you close out a lot of people’s ideas. After all, one connotation of ‘standard’ is ‘flag’ — MIDI becomes a flag that people wave. I hate to see musicians adopting any standard. I think if you adopt a standard in music, you’re dead. You’ve basically eliminated experimentation.”
One of the specific MIDI concepts that Polansky finds objectionable involves the rigid definitions of the MIDI messages. “MIDI has all these words — Note On, Note Off, Aftertouch — and they’re not just words,” he says. “They’re actually defined. They restrict information significantly.” As another example, he points out that MIDI
