J. Anthony Allen shows why a MIDI track plays silent until you add an instrument. MIDI data contains no sound itself, just instructions like note-on and note-off. Add a synthesizer like Operator and those same MIDI messages suddenly produce audio.
Okay, I've said this before, but I'm gonna say it again because it is a super important concept when it comes to midi. MIDI is not audio. There is no sound in midi. These notes by themselves do not mean any kind of sound. There's no sound here. The reason we hear sound is because we have an instrument on this track. Okay, if I do something like this, let's go to this track. Here's the little MIDI clip we're playing with right now. Let's make a new MIDI track. Here's a MIDI track. I'm going to put this MIDI clip on this track and then I'm going to solo this track. So we only hear this track. Okay? So now here's all that MIDI information. Zoom out a little bit. There's my crazy chord. Okay, now let's hear it. Nothing. We hear nothing because. But MIDI is still working. Everything is working correctly. All those messages are being sent, but they're being sent to the instrument that's on this track, which there isn't one. And so these notes are saying, turn this note on, turn that note on, turn this note off, turn that note off. But nobody's listening, right? There's no synthesizer to listen. So I take something like, I don't know, operator, which is a synthesizer. I put that on the track. Now when this says note on, note off, it knows what notes the operator synthesizer is going to say. Ah, I know how to play that note. And it's going to play those notes. Cool. So MIDI by itself does not make any sound at all. It only tells something else how to make the sounds.
