Musical Instrument Digital Interface

You can listen to Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.mid, .midi) files. The MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a format for sending music information between electronic music devices; for example, synthesizers and PC sound cards. It was developed in 1982, but since it was developed by the music industry, is very flexible and can be used for everything from very simple to professional music making.

MIDI files do not contain sampled sound, but a set of digital musical instructions (musical notes) that can be interpreted by a PC sound card.

MIDI cannot record sounds, only notes. Or, to put it another way, it cannot store songs, only tunes. As they contain only instructions (notes), MIDI files can be extremely small. For example, a file could be only 23K in size but can play for nearly 5 minutes.

The .mid format is supported by many different software systems over a large range of platforms. MIDI files are supported by all the most popular Internet browsers.