A Bit of MIDI Show Control History
Note: I’m in the process of extracting the Show Control information out of my “big book” Show Networks and Control Systems into a new book. In the process, I’m retiring some of the historical information and instead posting it here so it’s available.
This was originally on page 287 from Chapter 23: MIDI Show Control (MSC) in the second (2017) edition of my book Show Networks and Control Systems:
A Bit of MIDI Show Control History
MIDI was adopted by the professional sound industry soon after its introduction in 1983, since the sound and music businesses have always been intertwined. Many musical MIDI messages are well suited to sound control—a program change command applies as well to an audio processor as it does a musical synthesizer. The entertainment lighting industry jumped on the MIDI bandwagon in the late 1980s, with musical-equipment manufacturers such as Sunn, which made club and small touring lighting systems, leading the way. Other companies such as Electronic Theatre Controls, Strand, and Vari*Lite, soon caught on. However, standard MIDI messages don’t translate easily to disciplines like lighting control: What musical MIDI message do you use to initiate a cue? How do you control a fader? How do you fire a macro? How do you set a main level?
Some lighting companies created proprietary implementations where standard MIDI Program Change messages triggered cues; moving light companies often based their implementations on note commands, where arbitrary notes were assigned to various buttons on a proprietary console. These note messages could be recorded into some sort of MIDI sequencer, and played back later to initiate complex cue-based operations. These varying implementations led to a situation very similar to the state of the music industry in the days before MIDI, or the lighting industry before DMX—similar devices had similar control capabilities but spoke different languages. In this case, it was more like different dialects because, though all the controllers spoke MIDI, few could understand each other.
Talk of creating a standard MIDI implementation for show applications culminated in 1989 at the “MIDI Mania” panel discussion at the Lighting Dimensions International (LDI) trade show in Nashville. Andy Meldrum, a programmer for Vari*Lite, put forth a proposal for an open, standard implementation of System Exclusive messages that would allow controllers from any manufacturer to be connected and controlled. Participants were excited about the possibilities of a standard protocol and, in December 1989, Charlie Richmond of Canada’s Richmond Sound Design organized a Theatre Messages working group within the MIDI Manufacturer’s Association (MMA) and set up a forum on the USITT’s Callboard electronic bulletin-board system. Through contributions on Callboard and a great deal of footwork on Richmond’s part, a formal standard was developed and sent to the MIDI Manufacturer’s Association for an acceptance vote in 1991. The standard was approved by the MMA and sent to the Japanese MIDI Association for final, international approval. MIDI Show Control Version 1.0 became a standard in the summer of 1991.