Sheet music has always been an invisible treaty. A shared language that belongs to everyone and no one. But fifty years ago, as musicians began shaping sound out of raw electricity, that treaty fell apart.
In this episode
The Broken Treaty: Why early synthesizers from different manufacturers couldn't talk to each other, and the resulting landscape of incompatible voltages.
The Unlikely Alliance: How Dave Smith in the US (Sequential Circuits) and Ikutaro Kakehashi in Japan (Roland) looked past corporate rivalry to build a universal standard.
The Birth of MIDI: How microscopic 1981 microprocessors forced engineers to shrink the musical universe into elegant, lightweight digital sentences.
Juan Atkins: the Detroit musician whose work sparked the global rise of techno music.
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